Recent News
Education
Ph.D., University of Tennessee
M.A., University of Arkansas
B.A., University of Arkansas
Scholarly Focus
- American Literature
Personal Website
Publications
Books
Poe, Queerness, and the End of Time . Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
Against the Gallows: Antebellum American Writers and the Movement to Abolish Capital Punishment , University of Iowa P, 2011.
Unwelcome Voices: Subversive Fiction in the Antebellum South , University of Tennessee P, 2005.
Evelyn Scott: Recovering a Lost Modernist , edited with Dorothy Scura, University of Tennessee P, 2001.
Selected Articles
"The Cultural and Political Work of Poe's 'The Masque of the Red Death' during the AIDS Era," Edgar Allan Poe Review , vol. 21, no. 2, Autumn 2020, pp. 192-223.
"Counterparts: Poe's Doubles from 'William Wilson' to 'The Cask of Amontillado,'" Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe , eds. J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott Peeples, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018. 236-251.
"Resisting Reproduction in Edgar Allan Poe's Family Fictions," Studies in American Fiction 45. 2 (Fall 2018): 165-89.
"'Nevermore!': Non-Normative Desire and Queer Temporality in Poe's 'The Raven,'" Poe Studies 49 (2016): 80-98.
"Edgar Allan Poe and the Art of Fiction," A History of Virginia Literature , ed. Kevin Hayes, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015. 180-91.
“‘Her Little Maid Mandy’: The Abolitionist Slave Owner and the Rhetoric of Affection in the Life and Early Fiction of E. D. E. N. Southworth,” J19 2.1 (Spring 2014): 53-82.
“Surviving National Disunion: Civil War Novels of the 1860s,” Oxford History of the Novel in English , Vol. 5: American Novels to 1870, eds. J. Gerald Kennedy and Leland Person, New York: Oxford UP, 2014. 564-78.
“A Scribbling Woman’s Rebuttal: Grace Greenwood Responds to the Hawthornes,” N athaniel Hawthorne Review 39.2 (Fall 2013): 166-81.
“Revising Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Sympathy, the State, and the Role of Women in E. D. E. N. Southworth’s The Lost Heiress,” E. D. E. N. Southworth: Recovering a Nineteenth-Century Popular Novelist , eds. Melissa Homestead and Pam Washington, Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2012. 183-204.
“Slavery and Abolitionism,” Edgar Allan Poe in Context , ed. Kevin Hayes, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. 138-47.
“‘That I could look . . . on my own crucifixion and bloody crowning’: Walt Whitman’s Anti-Gallows Writing and the Appeal to Christian Sympathy,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 27 (Fall 2009): 1-27.
“Trust Thyself?: Teaching Poe’s Murder Tales in the Context of Transcendental Self-Reliance,” Approaches to Teaching Poe’s Prose and Poetry , MLA, 2009. 154-60.
“‘I put my fingers around my throat and squeezed it, to know how it feels’: Anti-Gallows Sentimentalism and E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand,” Legacy (2008): 41-61.
“The Politics of Poetry: The Democratic Review and the Gallows Verse of William Wordsworth and John Greenleaf Whittier,” American Periodicals 17 (2007): 1-25.
“Recovering Southern Identity in Evelyn Scott’s Migrations and Escapade,” Mississippi Quarterly 59.4 (2006): 557-75.
“Burning Mrs. Southworth: True Womanhood and the Intertext of Ellen Glasgow’s Virginia ,” S outhern Literary Journa l 37 (2004): 25-40.
“A Re-Awakening: Anne Tyler’s Post-Feminist Edna Pontellier in Ladder of Years ,” Critique 44 (2003): 25-40; reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 205, Thomson Gale, 2005. 319-26.
“William Gilmore Simms’s Last Word on Slavery: The Racial Politics of ‘ Bald-Head Bill Bauldy ’ and ‘ The Humours of the Manager ,’” Southern Quarterly 41 (2003): 110-18.
“The Danger of Sympathy: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Hop-Frog’ and the Abolitionist Rhetoric of Pathos,” Journal of American Studies 35 (2001): 239-54.
“‘ This Dainty Woman’s Hand ...Red with Blood’: E .D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand as Abolitionist Narrative,” ATQ 15 (2001): 59-80.
“Copying What the Master Had Written: Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave and the Southern Historical Romance,” Southern Quarterly 38 (2000):78-92.
Awards & Service
Samuel and Susan Crowl Professorship in English Literature, 2015-2020
Unwelcome Voices: Subversive Fiction in the Antebellum South was awarded the Nancy Dasher Prize for Literary Scholarship by the College English Association of Ohio in 2008.
Kate and Hall Peterson Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society, April 2008
Secretary/Treasurer, Poe Studies Association, 2006-11
Courses Taught
- ENG 2010: Critical Analysis of Fiction and Nonfiction Prose
- ENG 250: Introduction to Textual Analysis
- ENG 253: American Literature Survey
- ENG 254 / 307J: Writing and Research in English Studies
- ENG 3080J: Writing and Rhetoric II
- ENG 321/3210: American Literature to 1865
- ENG 322/3220: American Literature, 1865-1918
- ENG 323/3230: American Literature, 1918 to the Present
- ENG 327: African American Fiction
- ENG 3570: Law and Literature
- ENG 4600: Poe and the American Specters of Race and Slavery
- ENG 460: Ohio in the American Literary Imagination
- ENG 460: American Women Writers in the 19th Century
- ENG 460: America's Literature of Fear: The Gothic Tradition in the U.S.
- ENG 465: Major American Authors--Nathaniel Hawthorne
Graduate Courses
Topics have included the American Gothic, American Romanticism, Sympathy in Nineteenth Century American Literature, and American Realism.