As a scholar of American culture in a global context, my research is animated most strongly by my curiosity about how narratives (and their critical metanarratives) are understood across media and how they help shape national, regional, and personal identities. Because crimes often define the limits of a nation or region’s identity in relation to the individual and smaller social groups, I examine crime narratives as they are received and transformed through a wide array of genres and media—including newspaper accounts, trial transcripts, novels, operas, films, radio plays, and so on. This scholarship is undertaken through an approach I developed in my dissertation that utilizes an anarchist critical methodology and the science of complexity.
Over the years, I have published a number of works demonstrating this two-pronged approach. In late 2014, my chapter overview of the psychological thriller—which used methods from evolutionary biology to trace the intellectual, genre, and material influences on its development—was published in Salem Press’s Critical Insights entry on the American thriller. In 2015, McFarland Press published my essay on Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of Shutter Island, which reflects on Scorsese’s bricolage use of genre to explore the American historical response to the Shoah, in an edited collection on the fantastic in Holocaust literature and film. In 2016, my essay on Faulkner’s involvement in a genre I call “soft-boiled noir” was accepted in a special issue on noir in The Faulkner Journal, while the theoretical portion of my dissertation introduction was published in a special issue of The South Atlantic Review on adaptation. That same year, I also published my 2012 presentation to the renowned Baker Street Irregulars on how some “unfaithful” adaptations of Sherlock Holmes add dimension to the character’s history that Conan Doyle never provided. In 2018, I employed a complexity-based analysis of a trans-European adaptation of Patricia Highsmith stories, while from 2019–2023, I explored the work of John D. MacDonald and Elmore Leonard and their particular augmentations of crime fiction into ecocrime fiction and noir buffa, respectively. Intermittently, I addressed Edgar A. Poe's place in Southern and cosmopolitan literature, as well as the relationship between historical self-consciousness and narrative responses to crisis. Each of these publications seeks to address gaps in the critical metanarratives of their areas.
Presentations
Selected Conference Presentations
"A Case of Identity: The Neu(rodivergent) Game." South Atlantic Modern Language Association. Atlanta, GA. Nov. 9–11, 2023.
"From Opera to Noir." South Atlantic Modern Language Association. Virtual event through Zoom. Nov. 11–13, 2022.
"Prestige and Pop History." Roundtable on Books and TV. South Atlantic Modern Language Association. 2022.
“In These Dark Times: Adaptation as Reinterpretation.” Roundtable on The Scandal of Adaptation. South Atlantic Modern Language Association. Virtual due to COVID-19 (planned for Jacksonville, FL; through Accelevents). Nov. 13–15, 2020.
Roundtable on Burt Reynolds (organizer and participant). South Atlantic Modern Language Association. Atlanta, GA. Nov. 15–17, 2019.
“The Place of Film in the Work of Elmore Leonard.” Literature/Film Association, New Orleans, LA. 29 Nov.–1 Dec. 2018.
“The Agony of Lafitte: The Human Drama of Piracy in the Parlor” (organizer). South Atlantic Modern Language Association (Association of Adaptation Studies), Birmingham, AL. 2–4 Nov. 2018.
“The Varieties of Pirate Experience in Southern Fiction.” Society for the Study of Southern Literature. Austin, TX. 15–18 Feb. 2018.
“My Funny Valentine: Burt Reynolds’s Vision of Gender and Sexuality in his Crime Films.” South Atlantic Modern Language Association, Atlanta, GA. 3–5 Nov. 2017.
“The Mansion as Soft-Boiled Noir.” American Literature Association Symposium (“Criminal America: Reading, Studying and Teaching American Crime Fiction”), Chicago, IL. 3–4 Mar. 2017.
“The Descent of the Mind: On the Origin of the Psychological Thriller.” American Literature Association (Crime Fiction Group). Washington, DC. 22–25 May 2014.
“Conscience of The Courier: Hurston’s Literary Journalism.” Comparative Drama Conference. Baltimore, MD. 4–6 Apr. 2013.
“The Triumph of Being Unfaithful: Film Adaptations of The Valley of Fear.” Baker Street Irregulars–UCLA Symposium, Sherlock Holmes: Behind the Canonical Screen. Los Angeles, CA. 1–3 Sept. 2012.
“Another Lost Cause: The Rise and Fall of Burt Reynolds as the New Southern Man” on the “Bootlegging Burt Reynolds” panel (organizer). Society for the Study of Southern Literature. Nashville, TN. 29 Mar.–1 Apr. 2012.
“Continental Adaptation: The Modern Cinderella’s Journey through James Cain, John Stahl, and Douglas Sirk.” South Central Modern Language Association. Hot Springs, AR. 27–29 Oct. 2011.
“‘But we aren’t in France’: Postwar Representations of Gender and the South in Boris Vian’s J’irai cracher sur vos tombes" South Central Modern Language Association. Baton Rouge, LA. 29–31 Oct. 2010.
“The Shifting Function of the South in Noir.” Society for the Study of Southern Literature. New Orleans, LA. 8–10 Apr. 2010.
“Take No Pride In It, Want No Piece of It: The Southern and Catholic Elements in the Fiction of James M. Cain.” Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association. San Francisco, CA. 19–22 Mar. 2008.
Public Arts & Humanities
Podcast and Newsletter (with Word Diurnal) (coming Spring 2024): contact [email protected] for more details.
"Everything That Rises Must Converge (Parts One and Two)," Everything That Rises podcast, hosted by John Michael Meehan, Listen Notes, 26 April and 6 May 2020.
“The Experiment Was Done Incorrectly: Voice in Scientific Writing,” inaugural lecture in “Writing Science” series, sponsored by LSU’s Office of Research & Economic Development, 8 June 2017 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_1BTldgzHQ&feature=youtu.be).
"The Adventure of the Indefatigable Detective: Sherlock Holmes in Adaptation and Derivation," closing lecture for the Russell Mann Sherlock Holmes Research Collection Exhibition, sponsored and hosted by Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University 24 Jan. 2017 (associated blog post: https://news.blogs.lib.lsu.edu/2017/01/20/sherlock/).
Panel Discussion on the humanities job market (with Dr. Christopher Raczkowski) for the Alabama School of Mathematics and Science, 3 Apr. 2014.
Panel Discussion (with Dr. Carl Freedman and Dr. Patrick McGee) on Jacques Audiard’s Un prophète, Tournées Festival at LSU (French Embassy program that brings French cinema to American colleges and university campuses). 3 Nov. 2011.
“Sherlock Holmes in Adaptation,” sponsored by Louisiana Public Broadcasting, hosted by Barnes & Noble, 4 Nov. 2010.
PBS fundraiser spokesman (expert on BBC’s Sherlock), Fall 2010.