AV俱乐部

Education

BA, MA (McGill)
PhD (Waterloo)聽

Personal Website:

My areas of research and teaching are varied. My teaching covers American literature, popular culture, science fiction, and theory. My research pivots around nineteenth-century American literature, but my work on popular culture and specific genres has taken me into the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, and into other national literatures in English. Methodologically, my scholarship has generally focused on theories of identity (especially critical theories of gender and race, as well as queer theory).

While at Dal, I鈥檝e developed undergraduate courses in popular culture, the Beat Generation, early and contemporary science fiction, and seminars on prison studies, race and gender in American SF, utopian literature and theory, cyborg theory, and American gothic. At the graduate level, I鈥檝e recently led the seminars 鈥淎frofuturism鈥� and 鈥淎merican Utopias.鈥�

My past and present projects have included extensive work on prison writing (both works by prisoners and more generally about prisons) and speculative fiction and film (including science fiction, the gothic, and non-realist modes more generally). Recent book publications include the monograph,聽Gender, Race, and American Science Fiction: Reflections on Fantastic Identities;聽a collection of essays,聽American Gothic Cultures; and a scolarly edition of Ian Fleming's 1953 novel Casino Royale.

I am currently working on a project concerning gothic representations of energy cultures (including electricity, petroculture, and others).

Selected Publications

• Gender, Race, and American Science Fiction: Reflections on Fantastic Identities (Routledge 2015)
• Fitting Sentences: Identity in the 19th - and 20th-Century Prison Narratives聽(U of Toronto P, 2005)
• co-ed. With Joel Faflak, American Gothic Culture: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh UP, 2016)
• co-ed. with Joel Faflak,聽The Public Intellectual and the Culture of Hope聽(U of Toronto P, 2013)
• co-ed. with Julia M. Wright,聽Captivating Subjects: Writing Confinement, Citizenship, and Nationhood in the Nineteenth Century聽(U of Toronto P, 2005)
• co-ed. with Julia M. Wright, Casino Royale (1953) by Ian Fleming (Broadview 2020)
• 贰诲.听Tarzan of the Apes聽(1914) by Edgar Rice Burroughs (Oxford World鈥檚 Classics, 2010)
• Ed. Prisons and Prisoners: Some Personal Experiences聽(1914) by Constance Lytton (Broadview, 2008)聽

Selected Professional Positions

Co-president (with Justin Edwards, Strling U), International Gothic Association (2017-2019)
President, Association for Canadian College and University Teachers of English (2014-2016)
Second Vice President, AV俱乐部 Faculty Association
President, Canadian Association for American Studies (2010-2012)
New England and Eastern Canada Regional Delegate, Modern Language Association Delegate Assembly (2008-2011)
American Literature Director, Northeast MLA (2006-2009)

Grants and Awards

SSHRC Insight Grant (2015-2021)
Research Development Fund Grants (2009, 2011, and 2014)
SSHRC Standard Research Grant (2006-2009)
John Charles Polanyi Prize for Literature (U of Western Ontario, Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism, 2005)
SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship (U of Notre Dame, 2003-2005)
Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (one award in 2015, one in 2012, two in 2004)
Northeast MLA Summer Research Fellowship (2003)
SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship (1998-2000)