Overview
I hold a joint appointment in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and English.
My most recent book, Never On Time, Always in Time: Narrative Form and the Queer Sensorium, works at the intersections among gender, sexuality, ethnicity and diaspora in twentieth- and twenty-first century queer fiction, examining the multiple functions of queer temporality in contemporary US fiction, exploring the way in which attempts to represent queer time both enable and demand reworkings of narrative form. In examining queer subjects who grapple with exile, diaspora, transnational migration and even mundane family dissolution, this project considers the status of the queered body’s senses, desires, and histories in a group of texts that deploy the body as a vehicle for the enactment of queer temporality. In deviating from conventional temporality—both at the level of the story and the level of the form—these texts produce a topo-temporal opening for something else, an alternative experience of the past, present, or future and a body’s queered relationship to one or all. A part of this project appeared as “The complexity of loss itself’: Comics Form and Fun Home’s Queer Reparative Temporality,” in American Literature in June 2018, special issue on queer comics edited by Darieck Scott and Ramzi Fawaz. My first book, Regions of Identity: The Construction of America in Women's Fiction, 1885-1914 (Stanford University Press, 1999) examines the contribution of women's fictions to cultural discourses of national identity and offers a comparative analysis of the impact of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and region in this fiction. Currently I am working on a project on contemporary Irish fiction, as well as a cultural studies project on the Irish keen.
Research Focus
- American Literature After 1865
- Women's Literature
- Feminist Literary Criticism and Theory
- Lesbian/Queer Theory
- 20th and 21st century US literature
- Race and ethnicity in US fiction
- Queer theory
- Diaspora studies
In the news
- Trans Studies NOW! "We're here, we're Queer, Trans, and Feminist in the Academy"
- Call for Submissions: Biddy Martin Graduate Prize & LGBT Studies Undergraduate Prize