I am an Associate Professor in English literature at the Department of Language Studies. I teach courses in literature, cultural studies, academic writing and language proficiency at all levels.
Research Interests
My research interests include:
-how fictional texts imagine and explore relationships between humans and non-humans, in part as a means of interrogating the limits of traditional human-centered modes of viewing the world
-the processes involved in reading, fan response or other uses of fiction (examined in particular via the cognitive concept of Theory of Mind and the individual or collective creation of storyworlds)
-the conventions, tendencies and 'rules' of genre fictions (e.g. Gothic and science fiction), including how different media forms adapt such rules
-the narrative poetics of identity formation, including socially imposed identities
-how meaning is created when texts reference other texts through allusion, adaptation, etc.
Previous Research
My previous research has focused on several of these main interests. I investigate audience strategies and narrative patterns in different genres and media such as horror roleplaying games in "Playing with the Mythos" (2007). I took a similar approach in my doctoral dissertation, The Gothic in Contemporary Interactive Fictions (2010), in which I examine how the poetics of literary Gothic conventions, tropes and elements are specifically reinvented in four contemporary interactive fictions. The wholly text-based works are Nevermore (2000) by Nate Cull, Anchorhead (1998) by Michael S. Gentry, Madam Spider's Web (2006) by Sara Dee and Slouching Towards Bedlam (2003) by Star C. Foster and Daniel Ravipinto. As several of these works are highly intertextual I also discuss fiction written by Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft and Bram Stoker. Central topics include the intersection of postmodernism and the Gothic, the digital poetics of Gothic conventions and contemporary conceptions of subjectivity. I continue to explore aspects of player experience, character subjectivity and digital poetics in Slouching from a non-Gothic perspective in "Epistemological Rupture and the Gothic Sublime in Slouching Towards Bedlam" (2012).
In two articles on the science fiction television series Battlestar Galactica (broadcast 2003-2009), I further explore questions of character subjectivity. In one article I specifically investigate these via aspects of narrative logic ("Utopia, Relationality and Ecology: Resurrecting the Natural in Battlestar Galactica" 2012) and in another article I consider the social, gendered construction of monstosity ("Making Starbuck Monstrous: The Poetics of Othering in Battlestar Galactica" 2014).
In my chapter in the volume Storyworlds Across Media, "The Developing Storyworld of H. P. Lovecraft" (2014), I argue that common thematic elements in Lovecraft's fiction guide audience expectations of and influence desire for storyworld instantiations, so that Lovecraft's name takes on 'cultural capital' in the Bourdieuan sense.
In "Fragmented Fiction: Storyworld Construction and the Quest for Meaning in Justin Cronin's The Passage" (2017), Maria Lindgren Leavenworth and I examine how literal and figurative forms of fragmentation that develop in the postapocalyptic narrative affect the reader's storyworld construction.
In "Human-Other Entanglements in Speculative Future Arctics” (2022), Maria Lindgren Leavenworth and I examine how speculative climate fiction, generated by real-world anxieties and aspirations, imaginatively and productively explores the effects of accelerated climate change. Employing theoretical concepts asserting entanglements between humans and others in the more-than-human environment, we analyze Laline Paull’s The Ice, Sam J. Miller’s Blackfish City, and Vicki Jarrett’s Always North, three novels that engage with climate change and its effects in the Arctic. Entanglements find different forms depending on the level of speculation in the works examined, but they all demonstrate the detrimental centrality of the human in past and future paradigms.