Education
Ph.D. Southern Illinois University
M.A. SUNY College at Brockport
B.S. SUNY College at Brockport
Scholarly Focus
American Literature
Popular Literature, Film, & Television
Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
Trauma Studies
Posthumanism
Critical Animality Studies
Publications
Book
Ghost, Android, Animal: Trauma and Literature Beyond the Human . Routledge, 2020.
Journal Articles and Book Chapters
“Shirley Jackson’s Posthumanist Ghosts: Revisiting Spectrality and Trauma in The Haunting of Hill House .” Arizona Quarterly , vol. 75, no. 4, 2019, pp. 53-76.
“‘A World of Death and Phantoms’: Auschwitz, Androids, and the Ethical Demands of ReadingTrauma and Fantasy Through Willing Un-Belief,” Topographies of Trauma : Fissures, Disruptions, and Transfigurations , edited by Danielle Schaub and Claudio Zanini, Brill Press International, 2019, pp. 45-61.
“Posthumanist Magic: Beyond the Boundaries of Humanist Ethics in Young Adult Fantasy.” Posthumanism in Young Adult Fiction: Finding Humanity in a Posthuman World , edited by Donna White and Anita Tarr. University Press of Mississippi, 2018, pp. 227-46.
“Breaking Through the Canvas: Towards a Definition of (Meta)Cultural Blackness in the Fantasies of Clive Barker.” Clive Barker: Dark Imaginer , edited by Sorcha Ni Fhlainn. Manchester UP, 2017, pp. 148-63.
“Mourning the Human: Working Through Trauma and the Posthuman Body in Lev Grossman’s The Magicians Trilogy.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts , vol. 28, no. 3, 2017, pp. 369-387.
“Posthuman Wounds: Trauma, Non-Anthropocentric Vulnerability, and the Human/Android/Animal Dynamic in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? ” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association , vol. 47, no. 2, 2015, pp. 91-112.
“A Sound ‘Almost Human’: Trauma, Anthropocentric Authority, and Nonhuman Otherness in Go Down, Moses .” The Faulkner Journal , vol. 27, no. 2, 2013, pp. 23-44.
“Remembering Why We Once Feared the Dark: Reclaiming Humanity Through Fantasy in Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy II. ” Journal of Popular Culture , vol. 45, no. 5, 2012, pp. 1041-59.
“‘Not an Apocalypse, the Apocalypse’: Existential Proletarization and the Possibility of Soul in Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse .” Science Fiction Film and Television , vol. 4, no. 2, 2011, pp. 225-48.
Edited Collections
Edited a special issue of Extrapolation , the premier international journal for the study of speculative fiction and theory.
Silvio, Carl and Tony M. Vinci, eds. Culture, Identities and Technology in the Star Wars Films: Essays on the Two Trilogies . McFarland, 2006
Courses Taught
ENG 2310: Speculative Fiction
ENG 3210: American Literature to 1865
ENG 3230: American Literature after 1918
ENG 3400: Analysis of the Moving Image ( Star Wars and American Culture; Game of Thrones and Cultural Studies; The Holocaust in Popular Film and Television)
ENG 3560: Young Adult Literature
ENG 3610: Creative Writing (Fiction)
ENG 3970T: Critical Posthumanisms
ENG 3990: Literary Theory
ENG 4600: Haunting and the Literary Imagination
ENG 4900: Apocalyptic American Fictions—Trauma and Intimacy After the End of the World
FILM 2020: Introduction to Film Analysis (Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror) Humanities 2080: Fairy Tales and the American Gothic