USC  THIS SITE

Education

PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1999

Areas of Specialization

• American Cultural Studies
• Nineteenth-Century American Literature
• African American Literature
• Gender Studies and Feminist Theory

Recently Taught Courses

ENGL 284	Nature Writing/Writing Nature
ENGL 388	History of Literary Theory and Criticism
ENGL/WGST 437	Women Writers
ENGL 744	American Romanticism: Structures of Feeling
ENGL 840	Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem
WGST 701	Feminist Theory

Professional Accolades

• NEH Summer Institute Scholar. 2011.
• Oklahoma Humanities Council Research Grant. 2007.
• ACLS/Mellon Fellowship for Junior Faculty, American Council of Learned Societies. 2004-05.
• University Outstanding Teacher Award, University of Tulsa. 2007.
• August Derleth Prize for Fiction. UW-Madison. 1999.

Current Research Projects

My new book project focuses on the relationship between cotton culture and black racial formation from 1861 to 1920. Here I am tracing the intersecting structures of racial meaning – regional, national, and global – that post-emancipation cotton economies both produced and relied upon. Through this work, I aim both to enhance our understanding of how conceptions of blackness were created, used, and lived by historical subjects, and to extend current theorizations of race and racial formation. The research draws upon a diverse range of representational practices: I am looking at the cotton centennial celebrations that took place across the South throughout the mid-1880s, myriad forms of industry advertising, debates concerning free labor, debates concerning free trade, visual art, popular entertainment, and works by writers including Charles Chesnutt, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Pauline Hopkins.

Selected Publications

Books

Editions

Essays

• "Black Belt Blackness: Du Bois on Dirt" in American Dirt. Eds Patricia Yaeger and Hildegard Hoeller. (Forthcoming Spring 2013)
• "Black Exaltadas" ESQ Special Issue: Exaltadas 57:1-2 (Summer 2011). Eds. Phyllis Cole and Jana Argersinger.
• "Harriet Beecher Stowe, Caroline Lee Hentz, Herman Melville, and American Racialist Exceptionalism." Blackwell Companion to American Fiction, 1780-1865. Ed. Shirley Samuels. Blackwell Publishers. (October 2004)
• "Chute Dialogics: A Sidelong Glance from Egypt, Maine." National Women's Studies Association Journal, 17:1 (Spring 2005) 1-22.
• "At the Table with Arendt: Toward an Interest-Based Model of Coalition Discourse." Hypatia: a Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 17:1 (Winter 2002) 1-33.

Recent Presentations

• "Cotton-Picking Blackness." Clark University, Race and Ethnic Studies. Worcester, MA. September 2011.
• Exaltadas Roundtable, sponsored by ESQ. American Literature Association, annual meeting. Boston, MA. May 2011.
• "Race, Region, and the Cotton Commodity Chain in the Nineteenth-Century U.S. South." American Studies Association, annual meeting. San Antonio, TX. November 2010.
• "Stagnation and Flow in The Colonel's Dream." American Literature Association, annual meeting. San Francisco, CA. May 2010.
• "Feeling Wrong: Racial Sympathy at the Turn of the Century." Society for the Study of American Women Writers, annual meeting. Philadelphia. October 2009.
• "The Price of Race: Economies of Difference in Alice Dunbar-Nelson's The Goodness of Saint Rocque." Women's and Gender Studies Research Series Lecture. September 2008.
• "Self-Possession Rightly Understood: The Cost of the Individual in Louisa May Alcott's Plumfield." American Literature Association, annual meeting. San Francisco, CA. May 2008.