Professional Appointments
Fisk University, Nashville, TN Associate Professor of English; Chair, Department of Arts & Languages; Coordinator, English and Gender Studies (2014 - present)
Graceland University, Lamoni, Iowa Assistant Professor of English (2013 - 2014)
Education
PhD English (literature), The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, May 2013
Dissertation: “The Dixie Plantation State: Antebellum Fiction and Global Capitalism”
M.A. English (literature), The University of Mississippi, May 2008
Thesis: “The Public Road in the Antebellum South: Race, Class, and Movement in Old Southwest Humor Stories and Slave Narratives”
B.A. The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, May 2005
German and English literature, with honors
Fellowships and Awards
Andrew W. Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies, Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2012.
The University of Tennessee Humanities Center, Resident Graduate Fellow, 2012-2013 Academic Year.
Chancellor’s Honors Award, Extraordinary Professional Promise, The University of Tennessee, 2012
Owens-Keenan Dissertation Fellowship, The University of TN, Fall 2011-Spring 2012.
The Bain and Irene Stewart Fellowship, The University of TN, Fall 2008-Spring 2010.
Presentations (selected)
“Investigating North Nashville: Participatory Action Research and Community Archiving.” American Studies Association, New Orleans, LA, November 2022.
“The Confederacy and Other Southern Fictions: Constructing and Reconstructing Southern Literature.” C19 Conference, Coral Gables, FL, March 2022.
"From Godey's to Liberia and Back: Sarah Josepha Hale and Proslavery Rhetoric." Modern Language Association, Chicago, January 2019.
Panel respondent, “The Tacky South.” American Studies Association, Atlanta, GA, November 2018.
"From Godey's to Liberia and Back: Sarah Josepha Hale and Proslavery Rhetoric." The Society for the Study of Southern Literature, Austin, TX, February 2018.
Panel chair and moderator, “Southern States of Insecurity: The South in Crises.” Modern Language Association, New York City, January 2018.
Invited speaker, “Sequencing Stories: Graphic Novels and Comic Narrative in Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner.” U of Wisconsin-Platteville, Humanities Festival, 30 October 2017.
“From Godey’s to Liberia and Back: Sarah Josepha Hale and the Domestic Economy of Slavery.” American Studies Association, Denver, CO, November 2016.
Panel chair and presenter, “The Slaveholders of Liberty: Lucy Holcombe Pickens’s The Free Flag of Cuba and the Southern Imperial Dream.” C19: The Society of 19th-century Americanists, Penn State, State College, PA, March 2016.
“‘He’s Nothing But a Tacky’: Tackiness and Transgression in Nineteenth Century Southwest Humor and Western Sketches.” Society for the Study of Southern Literature, Boston University, Boston, MA, March 2016.
Panelist, “Futures in Southern Studies.” Modern Language Association, Austin, TX, January 2016. (invited)
Panelist, “Region and Its (Dis)Contents.” Modern Language Association, Vancouver, BC, January 2015.
“‘Has politics killed literature?’: Simms and the Literary Nationalism of Young America.” William Gilmore Simms Society, Columbia, SC, September 2014.
Invited panelist, “The State of Southern Literary Studies: Emerging Voices.” Society for the Study of Southern Literature, Arlington, VA, March 2014.
“The Gothic New South: George Washington Cable’s John March, Southerner and the Politics of Reconstruction.” Society for the Study of Southern Literature, Arlington, VA, March 2014.
Modern Language Association
American Studies Association
C19: The Society of 19th-century Americanists
Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing
Society for the Study of Southern Literature (Executive Board member, 2014-2016)
William Gilmore Simms Society (Executive Board member since 2018)