My research interests include American literary and cultural studies since 1945, especially African American, immigrant, and the transnational; social protest literature; ecocriticism and the environmental humanities.
Recent work has been on the DJ aesthetics of Paul Beatty’s novel Slumberland; education and identity fashioning in the film Dear White People and the TV series Atlanta; and national allegory in Teju Cole’s novel Open City.
Academic dissent and a higher education protest literature.
My current book project focuses on forms of social protest in education. This mixed-methods project analyzes sculpture, film, novels, and life writing by academics within the context of the history and sociology of higher education.
In particular, I focus on representations of academic capitalism in these narratives and show that they protest against higher education’s increasingly private-good orientation, which undermines its democratic citizenship aims and common good mission. This project has three aims: 1) apply a protest literature lens to argue for a re-evaluation of university fiction as making a serious contribution to the higher education reform movement;
2) analyze the human dimension to academic protest literature, thereby adding a qualitative and cultural dimension to the field of critical university studies; and 3) define the particular characteristics of academic protest literature, thereby creating a space for education protest within the larger field of American protest literature.