Professor
PhD, Pennsylvania State University
Areas of Interest & Expertise
- Early American Literature
- Nineteenth-Century American Literature
- American Studies
- Film
- Textual Editing
- Comedy
- Dickens
Recent Upper Division & Graduate Courses Taught
Graduate Courses:
- Reading Comedy
- Remembering America: Narrative Voices of the Fifties
- Reading Culture, Reading Books: The Rise of the American Bestseller
- The History of the Book in Early America
- American Narrative and Film Comedy
- The Narrative and Techniques of Persuasion
Upper Division:
- Discovering Dickens's England: Traveling with the Nicklebys (at Cambridge, UK)
- Hitchcock and Espionage
- Faulkner and the American South
- Hollywood Romantic Comedy
- Shakespearean Comedy
- Time, Travel, and the Nineteeth-Century American Narrative
- Murder Will Out: The Detective in Fiction
- Woody Allen's Seriocomic World
Selected Publications
Leather-Stocking Redux: Or, Old Tales, New Essays (AMS Press, 2010).
Reading Cooper, Teaching Cooper (AMS Press, 2007).
The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground, by James Fenimore Cooper. ed. with Lance Schachterle and James P. Elliott (AMS Press, 2002).
"Cooper and America: A Bibliographical Essay" in James Fenimore Cooper: A Historical Guide (Oxford UP, 2007).
Honors
- 2014 Regents Distinguished Teaching Award
- 2013 A&S Outstanding Professor Award
- 2010 Literature in the Early American Republic, “Best New Journal Award, from the Council for Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ)
- 2009 Elected Member, American Antiquarian Society
- 2004 EGSA Outstanding Faculty Award
- 1998 Phoenix Award for Outstanding Graduating Teaching
- 1998 Fulbright Senior Lecturer, Belgium
- 1987 Fulbright Senior Lecturer, Norway
Offices
- 2009- Co-Founder and Co-Editor, Literature in the Early American Republic (LEAR)
- 1995 Textual Editor, The Cooper Edition
- 1982-2006 Associate Editor, Seventeenth-Century News
- 1982-2004 Senior Bibliographer, MLA International Bibliography
Recent Grants & Research Trips
- 2007 Oklahoma Humanities Council Research Grant
Recent Conference Presentations
“Cole and Cooper’s Landscape with Figures—On Canvas, on Paper.” American Encounters: Thomas Cole and the Narrative Landscape, Exhibit and Panel Discussion, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR. 5 August 2012.
"Reading Rose Budd; Or, Tough Sledding in Jack Tier." American Literature Association Conference, San Francisco, CA, 27 May 2010.
"Selling Cooper, Selling Chicago; or, Selling Mohicans as Bestseller." American Literature Association Conference, Cambridge, MA. 22 May 2009.
"More Flotsam and Jetsam in Editing Fenimore Cooper." James Fenimore Cooper Conference, Cooperstown and Oneonta, NY. 10 July 2007.
"Re-Reading the Early Republic: From Crevecoeur to Cooper," Visiting Faculty, AAS Seminar on the History of the Book, June 2007.
"The Case of the Missing Corpus; Or, The Art of Literary Sleuthing," 2004 Babcock Lecture, Hartwick College, Oneonta, NY.
Current Research & Projects