I am interested, above all, in collective efforts to cultivate more democratic and egalitarian societies. My scholarship focuses on the role of literature in sustaining and extending emancipatory political movements across generations. I have published on modernism and African American literature, on the history of the American Left and the African American freedom struggle. I have also published on psychoanalytic and cultural theory and on the democratic promise of the 21st-century university. To learn more, click on the book icons above or the links below for some of my published articles.

“Bethlehem: American Utopia, American Tragedy”

I am currently at work on an experimental book that employs modernist literary strategies in order to explore the history of one iconic city, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, from its 18th-century founding to its post-industrial present. The book explores the egalitarian aspirations of the people of Bethlehem over the course of three centuries, as well as the evolving structures of economic exploitation and racial and gender hierarchy that have constrained those aspirations. I am writing the book both for scholars of American Studies and for a broad general audience, seeking to contribute to contemporary discussions of what equality has meant, and might yet mean, in the United States.

For an article in which I explain the book’s mode of composition and provide an excerpt about enslaved Africans in 18th-century Bethlehem, click here.

For some collaborative public humanities projects that have emerged in tandem with my work on the book – including my first play, click here.

 

Selected Articles and Book Chapters

  • “The Choir House and the Blast Furnace: H.D.’s Bethlehem,” Raritan Vol. 38 no. 4 (Spring 2019). Download
  • “Enslaved in the City on a Hill: The Archive of Moravian Slavery and the Practical Past,” in History of the Present Vol. 6 no. 2 (Fall 2016). Download
  • “Sharing Knowledge, Practicing Democracy: A Vision for the 21st-Century University,” in Kalfou Vol.1 no. 2 (Fall 2014). Download
  • “Excess and Utopia: Meditations on Moravian Bethlehem,” in History of the Present Vol. 2. no. 2 (Fall 2012). Download
  • “’Writing So Fiery and Accurate’: Political Mourning in the Radical Biographies of Dos Passos’ U.S.A.,” in John Dos Passos: Biography and Critical Essays, eds. Maria Zina Goncalves de Abreu and Bernardo Guido de Vasconcelos (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010). Download
  • “Introduction,” Black and White: Land, Labor and Politics in the South by T. Thomas Fortune, ed. Seth Moglen (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007). Download
  • “On Mourning Social Injury” in Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society Vol.10, no.2 (Summer 2005). Download
  • “Modernism in the Black Diaspora: Langston Hughes and the Broken Cubes of Picasso” in Callaloo, Vol. 25, no. 4 (December 2002). Download