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I love teaching Moby-Dick in my American Literature: Beginnings to 1914 survey class. Rather than read Melville’s tome all at once, I took a page from one of my mentors, Benjamin Reiss, and spread it out over the whole semester. As a result, students read digestible chunks of the novel alongside the other texts we read. This allows us to juxtapose Melville’s omnivorous, maximalist novel with prose and poetry by a wide range of other authors, underscoring common themes. We enjoyed listening to this Freakonomics episode on whaling for some extra context. I also love showing students Matt Kish‘s astounding abstract art inspired by Moby-Dick.

Here are some of the slides I designed to accompany our discussions:

Melville

Over the past few years, I’ve been refining the way that I teach first year writing topics, including genre, argument, paragraphs, transitions, integrating sources, and specificity.

Argument

Argument-spring-24

Genre

Genre-fall-23

Integrating Sources

Integrating-sources

Paragraphs

Paragraphs-spring-24

Transitions

Transitions

Specificity

Specificity

I’m really excited to share my latest article, “Superman as the Measure of All Things: Black Gods and White Saviors in Watchmen and Doomsday Clock,” published in Literature and Theology. If you’re interested in the intersection of race, religion, and pop culture, I think you’ll dig it.

Gary Frank’s cover for Doomsday Clock #1 inspired the article’s title.

I’m working on two journal articles right now:

The first examines how Richard Powers’ The Overstory and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy link the non-human environment with a post-secular spirituality.

The next explores the nexus of race, theology, and pop culture through the graphic novel Watchmen and two of its spinoffs.

It was so nice to talk to Jessica Schumaker for the UGA English Department newsletter. I’m excited to join five of my colleagues as a Special Collections Faculty Teaching Fellow for 2023.

In this generous review, Brian Britt calls Excavating Exodus a “a major contribution to scholarship on African American reception of the Bible” and praises its “clarity and originality.”

Shelby Johnson’s review describes Excavating Exodus as an “elegant account of the resonances of one Biblical narrative in a long history of African American literature.”

Join Dr. Dori Coblentz and me on Zoom as we chat about our books on Thursday 5/12.

Register here: https://forms.gle/BrdeF8nSxuuQDRkC7

I’m incredibly honored to be invited to give a talk drawn from Excavating Exodus at my alma mater Wheaton College!

Last October, I co-led a workshop on writing academic book proposals for my colleagues. Drawing on my experience working with Clemson UP, I talked about how to find the right press for your book, what information editors are looking for in the proposal, and the steps in the submission process.

Book-Proposal