Research Interests

• United States culture, nineteenth and twentieth centuries
• Violence Studies, with an emphasis on war in a U.S. context
• Documentary Studies
• Cultural activism

My research and teaching focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth century U.S. culture, with a particular emphasis on violence and its relation to culture. I have written about crime, insurrection, slavery, and war, and taught courses such as “Female Criminality,” “American Prisons,” and “Militarism and the Culture of Peace.” My first book, John Brown’s Body: Slavery, Violence, and the Culture of War, examined representations of dead soldiers, produced during the Civil War, in light of a history of racial violence inflicted on free and enslaved African Americans during the antebellum period. In this book, I analyze the treatment of corpses—both actual and imagined—in an effort to illuminate the ways that wartime art ennobled battlefield death. Currently, I am writing a book entitled Anti-War Avant-Garde that considers the impact of the escalating arms race and the threat of nuclear apocalypse on documentary prose and film of the Vietnam era. Hardly neutral observers, the writers and filmmakers that I study (among them Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag. Emile de Antonio, Haskell Wexler, Mary McCarthy, and Robert Kramer) were participants in an activist counterculture; drawing on avant-garde techniques, they developed a documentary style that aimed to redefine, rather than record, reality. Taken together, these two books represent my ongoing commitment to developing an interdisciplinary method suited to the study of war.

Degrees

Ph.D. English, University of California, Berkeley, 1993
B.A. English, University of California, Berkeley, 1982

Honors and Awards

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Standard Research Grant, 2009-2012

(Three-year research grant, including one year’s leave)

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Institutional Grant, 2008-2009, 2007-2008

External Faculty Fellowship, Center for the Humanities, Oregon State University, 2002-2003

Sesquicentennial Associateship, University of Virginia, January-December 2001

Morse Junior Faculty Fellowship, Yale University, 1995-96

Books

John Brown’s Body: Slavery, Violence, and the Culture of War (Cultural Studies of the United States Series, University of North Carolina Press, 2004)

Articles

“ ‘Marked for Demolition’: Mary McCarthy’s Vietnam Journalism,” forthcoming in American Literature

“Against Photography: Susan Sontag’s Vietnam,” forthcoming in Photography and Culture

“Trip to Hanoi: Anti-War Travel and Transnational Consciousness,” in New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness, eds. Karen Dubinsky and Ian McKay (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)

“ ‘The Blood of Millions’: John Brown’s Body, Public Violence, and Political Community,” American Literary History (Winter 2001). Reprinted in Afterlife of John Brown, eds. Eldrid Herrington and Andrew Taylor (Palgrave Press, 2005)

” ‘Ghosts Might Enter Here’: Toward a Reader’s History,” in Scribbling Women: Engendering and Empowering the Hawthorne Tradition, eds. Melinda Ponder and John Idol (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999)

” ‘Emblem and Product of Sin’: The Poisoned Child in The Scarlet Letter and Domestic Advice Literature,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 10 (Spring 1997)

“Beyond the Talking Cure: Listening to Female Testimony on The Oprah Winfrey Show,” in Inventing the Psychological: Toward a History of Emotional Life in America, eds. Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog (Yale University Press, 1997)

“Harriet Jacobs and the Sentimental Politics of Female Suffering,” English Literary History 59 (1992)

Invited Lectures and Presentations

“Marching On: Burial, Memory, Progress,” Keynote Address, delivered at John Brown Day, John Brown State Historic Site, Lake Placid, New York, May 2010

“Imaging The New Soldier,” Visual Culture Colloquium, Carleton University, January 2010

“John Brown, Martin Luther King, and the Art Of ‘Creative Suffering,’” John Brown, Abolition, and the Legacies of Revolutionary Violence: A Conference Commemorating the 150th Anniversary of the Harpers Ferry Raid, Gilder Lehrman Center, Yale University, October 2009

“Making it New: Consumption and Consciousness on the Trip to Hanoi,” Oklahoma State University, American Studies Lecture Series, April 2008

“Radical Scavengers and Winter Soldiers: Documenting the War in Vietnam,” Institute for Historical Studies, University of Michigan, February 2006

“ ‘This Guilty Land’: Black Soldiers, Military Discipline, and the Wartime State,” Interdisciplinary Civil War Symposium, Lawrence University, April 2005

Conference Papers (selected)

“Sleeping In: Rest and Resistance at Dewey Canyon III,” Post-45 Collective, University of Missouri, November 2009

“Far From Vietnam: Susan Sontag and the Documentary Imaginary,” Feeling Photography Conference, University of Toronto, October 2009

“ ‘Marked for Demolition’: Mary McCarthy’s Vietnam Journalism,” Post-45 Collective, Yale University, November 2008

“Voices from Underground,” Canadian American Studies Association, November 2007

“Newsreel’s Vietnam: Documentary Method and the Romance of Resistance,” American Studies Association, October 2007

“Trip to Hanoi: Direct Action and the Politics of Self-Transformation,” Global Sixties Conference, Queen’s University, June 2007

“Trip to Hanoi: Anti-War Tourism and the Art of Reuse,” Cultural Studies Association, April 2007

“Asleep All This Time”: Documenting The Radicalization Of Vietnam Veterans In Winter Soldier, American Studies Association, October 2006

“Political Suicide: Susan Sontag’s Trip To Hanoi,” American Studies Association, October 2005

“From Civil War to Star Wars: Documentary Imagery on the Final Frontier,” American Studies Association, November 2003

“After Emancipation: Photographing Military Executions in Civil War America,” Modern Language Association, December 2001

“Civil War Poetry as Documentary Art,” Modern Language Association, December 1998

“Parricide Revisited: David Walker’s Jefferson,” American Studies Association, November 1998

“‘The Blood of Black Men’: Genealogy and Insurrection in the Writings of David Walker and John Copeland,” Organization of American Historians, April 1998