Subjects
Subjects taught in recent years:
21L.050 Reading Nonfiction (New!): The Personal Essay (Spring 2026)
21L.050 Reading Nonfiction (New!): The Art of Seeing Things (Fall 2025)
21L.434 Science Fiction and Fantasy: The Science Fiction of Freedom (Fall 2024)
21L.450 Global Environmental Literature (New!): Ecofeminism (Fall 2025)
21L.707 Problems in Cultural Interpretation: AI and the Literature of Consciousness (Spring 2025)
Publications
Books
The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence (Stanford University Press, 2025).
Land of Tomorrow: Postwar Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2019).
Articles and Book Chapters
“Humor as an AI-Complete Problem.” Studies in American Humor 12.2 (2026).
“Race Conditions.” American Literature 98.2 (June 2026).
“Liberal Education and the Politics of Discussion.” In Teaching Politically: Global Perspectives on Pedagogy and Autonomy, edited by May Hawas and Bruce Robbins (Fordham UP, 2025).
“The Ecologies of Data Visualization.” Diacritics 48.4: 52-75.
“Fiction: The 1960s to the 1980s.” American Literary Scholarship, 2020 (Duke University Press, 2022): 283-303.
“Big Data.” Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction, edited by Patrick O’Donnell, Stephen J. Burn, and Lesley Larkin (Wiley, 2022), 1-10.
“The City and the Landfill: Teaching Waste, Toxicity, and Southern Environmental History in Suttree.” In Teaching the Works of Cormac McCarthy, edited by Stacey Peebles and Benjamin West (Modern Language Association, 2022), 60-68.
“Rachel Carson, Environmental Rights, and the Publicity of Aesthetic Judgments.” ELH 88.3 (Fall 2021): 765-793.
“Market Segmentation and Shirley Jackson’s Domestic Humor.” American Literary History 33.1 (2021).
“Print Culture, Queer Form, and No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger.” Modern Fiction Studies 66.4 (Winter 2020): 650-675.
“Flannery O’Connor, the Phenomenology of Race, and the Institutions of Irony.” Twentieth-Century Literature 65.3 (September 2019): 237-260.
“Tragedy, Realism, Skepticism.” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 51.3 (December 2018): 209-236.
“Aggregation, Public Criticism, and the History of Reading Big Data.” PMLA 133.5 (October 2018): 1207-1224.
“Audre Lorde, Theodor Adorno, and the Administered Word.” New Literary History 49.3 (Summer 2018): 337-359.
“Global Provincialism: Orhan Pamuk and William Faulkner in the Age of World Literature.” Contemporary Literature 59.1 (Spring 2018).
“Genre, History, Ecology: James Welch’s Fools Crow and the Reagan Anti-Environmental Revolution.” Arizona Quarterly 73.2 (Summer 2017): 37-59.
“Nature, Necessity, and the Philosophy of Metaphor in Walden.” Nineteenth-Century Prose 44.2 (Fall 2017): 49-70.
“The Age of Anxiety: Patricia Highsmith, Existential Psychology, and the ‘Decline’ of American Naturalism.” American Literature 87.4 (December 2015): 769-98.
“Bourdieu, Cavell, and the Politics of Aesthetic Value.” Literature & Theology 29.3 (September 2015): 260-283.
“Accounting for The Road: Tragedy, Courage, and Cavell’s Acknowledgement.” Philosophy and Literature 37.2 (October 2013): 267-90.
“Silencing the Politics of Literature in Woolf’s The Voyage Out.” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 45.2 (Summer 2012): 269-98.
“Democracy, Justice, and Tragedy in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men.” Religion & Literature 43.3 (Autumn 2011): 107-33.
“Bringing ‘Fullness’ to Naomi: Centripetal Nationalism in the Book of Ruth.” HBT 33.1 (Fall 2011): 62-81.
“‘The Old, Old Battle of the Room’: The Politics of Space in A Room With a View.” The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 17.1 (Spring 2011): 80-92.
“Violating the Feminine: War, Kristeva, and The Things They Carried.” The Journal of the American Studies Association of Texas 41 (November 2010): 33-43.