current research.

My primary research area is American literature and culture of the Cold War. I am particularly interested in cross-disciplinary intersections among aesthetics and politics, as well as questions of style and taste. Other areas of interest include popular culture, including film, nineteenth-century American culture, and theories of narrative, historiography, and race.

My current book project focuses on the important concept of chance in anti-Communist rhetoric during the early Cold War, when American politicians, intellectuals, social critics, and others argued that totalitarian regimes sanctioned narratives of reality that denied the operation of chance in the world. In a range of works, Cold War thinkers identified chance with democracy and the denial of chance with totalitarianism. Because this denial was increasingly proclaimed by American anti-Communists, by the 1950s chance became a politically-loaded term not only for fiction writers, but also for historians, sociologists, and mathematicians on the government payroll. My book examines how writers and other intellectuals used chance to generate political critique, and shows how American fiction writers introduced moments of chance—spontaneity, disorder, accidents, linguistic uncertainty—into their narratives as a response to anxieties about totalitarian certainty.

selected publications.

"The Game Theory Narrative and the Myth of the National Security State." American Quarterly 61.2 (June 2009): 333-357.

"Cabaret and Antifascist Aesthetics." Criticism 50.4 (Fall 2008): 609-630.

"Kerouac His Own Historian: Visions of Cody and the Politics of Historiography." Clio 37 (Spring 2008): 193-218.

"Curbing Containment: Cold War Studies in the Twenty-First Century." Contemporary Literature 48 (Spring 2007): 150-164.

"The Zemblan Who Came in from the Cold, or Pale Fire, Chance, and the Cold         War." ELH 73 (Fall 2006): 755-780.

"Of Pickaninnies and Nymphets: Race in Lolita." Nabokov Studies 9 (2005):
1-17.

"Drink Versus Printer's Ink: Temperance and the Management of Financial Speculation in The Life of P.T. Barnum." American Studies 46 (Spring 2005): 45-65.

"'Ampersand, Quicksand': Williams, Man Orchid, and the Miscegenated American Idiom." Rigor of Beauty: Essays in Commemoration of William Carlos Williams. Ed. Ian Copestake. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004. 273-299.