Faculty Bios

  I specialize in American women writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Inspired in part by my first career as a newspaper reporter, I have always been fascinated by the dynamic exchange between journalistic practices and literary work. My first book,   Front-Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Literature and Culture, 1880-1930 , argued that the gritty, male-dominated vision of newspaper work associated with the rise of literary realism in the United States obscured a vibrant alternative tradition of women’s reporting. That tradition featured not objectivity and detachment, but rather material embodiment and emotional engagement. The myth of objectivity (and I do believe it’s a myth) has grown even more interesting to me with the spread of texts generated by AI. My interest in women’s reporting led to my second book: the first edited collection of the writings of daredevil stunt reporter Nellie Bly, which was published by Penguin Classics in 2014. In...

 Welcome! My classes at Villanova focus on literary modernism, 20th- and 21st- century British and Irish fiction, and the relationship between philosophy and fiction. I am the author of  Modernist Fiction and Vagueness: Philosophy, Form, and Language  (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and co-editor of the volume  Eliot Now  (Bloomsbury, 2024). I am the editor of two clusters of essays on #MeToo, T. S. Eliot, and Modernism in  Modernism/modernity Print + (2019, 2020). I have also written essays on literary modernism, gender, and philosophy, published in  James Joyce Quarterly ,  Modernism/modernity ,  Philosophy and Literature, Poetics Today, LARB , the  T. S. Eliot Studies Annual ,  nonsite  and  The Cambridge Companion to European Modernism . I am a three-time lecturer and seminar leader at the T. S. Eliot International Summer School. My current book project,  The Love Song of Modernism , focuses on modernism and fa...

I teach and do research in the areas of post-1945 American and global Anglophone fiction, apocalyptic literature, feminist fiction and theory, postmodern theory, science fiction, and contemporary film. I’ve recently taught courses on literary theory, apocalyptic literature, and climate fiction. In my scholarship, I’m interested in literature about various forms of contemporary crisis. Most recently, I published a book chapter considering the ways very recent apocalyptic novels  center the experience of human vulnerability in terms that chime with Judith Butler’s work on this topic and make reference to 9/11 to do so.   Another of my recent essays concerns affective responses to extinction in literary trilogies by William Gibson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Margaret Atwood, and N.K. Jemisin.  And a third recent article focuses on the recurrent figure of the femme fatale in contemporary apocalyptic narrative. My most recent book,  The Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twent...

My field is contemporary Anglophone African and African Diaspora literatures, including African oral performance studies. I’m particularly interested in Caribbean folklore and literary traditions, African oral literature, drama, fiction, and postcolonial studies. My first book,  Folklore in New World Black Fiction: Writing and the Oral Traditional Aesthetics  (The Ohio State UP, 2007), examines the fiction of two Americans, Toni Morrison and Jean Toomer, and two Guyanese, Wilson Harris and Roy Heath, for the myriad of ways they call attention to the intersections between orality and literacy, especially in relation to African oral performance aesthetics.  As a long-standing member of the International Society for the Oral Literatures of Africa (ISOLA) and once served as the Society’s President, I have been privileged to have an active involvement in the exciting research going on in African oral arts. In 2023, Nduka Otiono and I co-edited  Oral Literary Performance i...

I teach courses on Latinx literatures and cultures. These courses focus on the social, political, and literary movements of the 1960s; the cultural politics of migration, citizenship, and bordering; and representations of labor, resistance, and belonging.  As a scholar, I have published three books. Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization (University of Arizona Press, 2013) was the first book-length study of contemporary Latinx poetry and the first to put U.S. Latinx poets in conversation with poets in Latin America. With the poet Claudia Rankine, I coedited the critical anthology of contemporary U.S. poets, Poetics of Social Engagement (Wesleyan University Press, 2018). My articles and essays on poetry, poetics, and Latinx literature have appeared in American Poetry Review, Aztlán, Callaloo, College Literature, Hispanic Review, MELUS, Poetry , and The Writer’s Chronicle (AWP), among other journals, and in edited volumes published the Universi...