B.A. English, Creative Writing Concentration, University of Maine
M.A. English Language and Literature, University of Washington
Ph.D. English Language and Literature, University of Washington

• BWRIT 134 Composition
• BWRIT135 Research Writing
• BCORE 104 Discovery Core Experience: “The Cultural Work of Stereotypes”
• BCORE 115 Discovery Core: “The Functions of Sex: Race and Gender in America”
• BCORE 120 Discovery Core: “The Cultural Studies of Graphic Memoir”
• BIS/BEDUC 255 Critical Diversity Studies: “American Intersections”
• BLEAD 103 People Skills: “Power, Sociality, and Ethical Leadership Skills”

I teach classes on writing, American race and ethnic studies, feminist, gender, and queer/sexuality studies, literature, film, and visual art. My main teaching objective is to introduce learners to concepts and cultural texts that allow them to understand the variety of ways that power shapes our understanding of the social world, including our understanding of both others and ourselves. I am continually developing an inclusive, antiracist/feminist pedagogy that encourages learners to work actively to investigate the various ways that cultural texts (including literature, visual art, film, graphic memoir/comics, internet media, and bodies as texts) engage the intersection of the social categories of race, sexuality, and gender through a close attention to language and context and a critical questioning of the assumptions underlying most forms of cultural representation. Writing is an important aspect of all of my courses. I believe a writing-focused engagement with the cultural studies of literature and art allows students the opportunity to research and write about topics that explore their own life-worlds at a variety of critical distances while they develop foundational analytical skills that translate to other classes and their work beyond the university. For example, my composition and research writing courses offer new writers the opportunity to practice the skills, genres, and conventions of academic argumentation by engaging research and writing as an essential way to make connections between their analysis of concepts in scholarly sources and their interpretation of cultural texts (of different genres, styles, and times) and their own social worlds. My literature and cultural, American, and ethnic studies classes focus similarly on a cultural critique that interprets multi-ethnic texts that represent UWB’s diverse student populations through the analysis of form, concepts, texts, and the historical, cultural, and social contexts of our present moment in order to better understand how power works through the institutional structures and the social formations, categories, and practices that frame and structure our lives. The goal of all of my classes is to build students’ intellectual confidence in their own skills and abilities, especially in writing and researching arguments, analyzing/interpreting texts, and making connections between their analysis of concepts and texts and their life-worlds.

My research takes an interdisciplinary and intersectional approach to the cultural studies of sexuality as a form of gendered racial power, including especially the way that stereotypes work as tactics of this power. I argue that literature and other cultural texts have always provided a better understanding of the stereotype as a form of power than the established theories and scholarship have.

My book project, “Promiscuous Contexts: Race, Sex, Gender and the Problem of the Stereotype in the Politics of Representation,” intervenes in what I call the “corrective fallacy” in the understanding of stereotyping apparent in a wide variety of scholarship, social movement discourse, and literary, popular, and other cultural texts. These accounts continue to rely on Walter Lippman’s early social psychological rendering of stereotypes as false “preconceptions” able to be corrected given enough “true” information. The reliance on these corrective models assigns the problematic of the stereotype (a tactic of systemic power) to individual mindsets rather than material and historical factors. This approach remains relatively unquestioned in the current quantitative scholarship that once again psychologizes the idea of the stereotype by its effects (stereotype threat) or impulses (implicit bias) and focuses on “correcting” the mindset of either victims or perpetrators. Moreover, postcolonial and performance studies’ focus on the “transgressive” possibilities of the stereotype’s “productive ambivalence” or of parody, remains invested in the idea that the effects of stereotyping can be changed or offset through a critical re-presentation. I also contend that this understanding of stereotypes frames our reading practice of any texts that represent them. Against the grain of this corrective discourse, my project offers a schematic I discern in the work of Ida B. Wells, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin that I call, following Kobena Mercer, “promiscuous contexts.” While much of the scholarship on these authors analyzes the “truth” they reveal behind a particular stereotype, I draw on women of color feminism, queer of color critique, and the cultural studies of representation to argue these texts offer radical contextualizations that reveal the stereotype as a form of promiscuous power that works most effectively through its multiple relations with other stereotypes within multiple structures of power, desire, and identity. For example, my first chapter examines how Baldwin’s fiction contextualizes the Black Rapist stereotype in order to reveal how it overwrites identity formation and relations of desire in ways that make it impossible to “correct,” or for his characters and his readers to escape. Providing no relief “outside” of stereotype, Baldwin requires his readers, like his protagonists, to reconcile their complicity with the stereotype as part of their reading practice of literary and bodily texts. I focus on these texts because they assert the need for an anti-racist politics that exists in the context of complicity with both stereotypes and the structures of power they uphold.

I am currently working on a graphic memoir the reconnecting to places.