I’m a professor in the Department of English at Dalhousie University, where I am also cross-appointed to the Gender and Women’s Studies Program. My teaching covers American literature, popular culture, science fiction, and theory. My research pivots around nineteenth-century American literature, but my work on popular culture and specific genres has taken me into the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, and into other national literatures in English. Methodologically, my scholarship has generally focused on theories of identity (especially critical theories of gender and race, as well as queer theory).  I have served in the past as president of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, the Canadian Association for American Studies, and as co-president of the International Gothic Association.

My past and present projects include work on prison writing (both works by prisoners and more generally about prisons) and speculative and fantastic fiction and film (including science fiction, the gothic, and non-realist modes more generally). My most recent book publications are a monograph, Gender, Race, and American Science Fiction: Reflections on Fantastic Identities (which received an honorable mention in the 2015 Robert K. Martin book prize competition); a textbook, Thinking Popular Culture; and a collection of essays, American Gothic Culture. You can see these and other projects by clicking “Books.”

While at Dal, I’ve developed undergraduate courses in popular culture, the Beat Generation, early and contemporary science fiction, and seminars on prison studies, race and gender in American SF, utopian literature and theory, cyborg theory, and American gothic. At the graduate level, I’ve recently held seminars on Afrofuturism and Climate Fiction. You can see current and past syllabi by clicking “Teaching,” above.

Please feel free to contact me using the contact form linked at the top of the page.