Teaching
I teach literature, creative writing, and interdisciplinary humanities at The University of Louisiana at Lafayette. I love the literature and art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but just as much I like introducing students to something like Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year. I teach more American survey courses than British ones, but I'm a big fan of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, and a host of other English writers. As often as I can, I try to incorporate world authors like Franz Kafka, Leo Tolstoy, and Gabriel García-Márquez.
In my interdisciplinary classes, we read literature, study art, and watch films dealing with themes in the humanities. Most recently, I’ve focused on the literature and arts of Medicine and Disease as well as works about Captivity and Imprisonment. This latter has led to an exploration of the slave narratives of Harriet Jacobs and Solomon Northup alongside Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son (set in North Korea), and Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi. Online CV |
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Selected Courses• Caged: Literature and Art of Imprisonment
• Plagues and Poxes • Medicine and Disease • The Magic and Real: García-Márquez, Frida Kahlo, Isaac Singer, Marc Chagall, and Antoní Gaudi |
Awards
• 2010 Ray Authement Excellence in Teaching Award
• 2009-10 ATLAS Grant: Awards to Louisiana Artists and Scholars. Louisiana Board of Regents. |
Essays & Stories• "When Bad Things Happen to Good Characters." Ron Hogan's Beatrice. Oct. 12, 2016.
• "The Accidental Bonsai and Strategies for Pruning." Glimmer Train Bulletin. Sept. 2016. • "The Sorrows You Can't Enter." The Georgia Review, Winter 2015. • "Vandalism." Glimmer Train. Aug. 2009. |
Interview
• "English prof. authors book Box of Blue Horses." With Seth Dickerson. The Vermilion. Nov. 20, 2013.
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