Selected recent professional activities

Board of Directors, Fulbright Association

Board Member. Vice Chair of the 24-person board that oversees the Fulbright Association and its mission of promoting international education and exchange in order to promote peace. To date, there have been over 380,000 Fulbright recipients in 165 countries. Serve as Chair of the Governance & Nominating Committee and member of the Executive Committee.

Senior Advisor, Honor Education, et. al.

Senior Advisor. Provide strategic vision and development for teaching and learning platform company that delivers transformational education for institutions, faculty, and students.

Coursera Council, edX/2U Partner Advisory Council.

Council Member. These councils provide input on high-level strategic plans and feedback on early opportunities for each respective platform.

Selected grants & awards.

CM and Demaris Hudspeth Endowed Award
This annual award honors faculty who provide extraordinary service to student life and organizations at Rice University.

Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board Grant
"Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, Digital Design for Student Success," Primary Investigator, 2022-2023, $650,000

Fulbright Fellowship
University of Exeter, England

Senior Fellow
Freie Universität Graduate School, Berlin

English 560 | American Literature:
Race, Nation, Empire

Race, nation, and empire have constituted particularly robust and durable analytic frameworks for American writers and for the study of American literature more generally. This course considers how these three key terms have engaged writers during the rise and hey-day of US nation formation and how these terms have subsequently shaped critical accounts of the US literary tradition, particularly over the last decades.

Throughout the semester we will ask: What happens if we dislocate the stable place of race, nation, and empire in US literary studies? Do these three key analytic terms provide a sufficient critical lens for understanding the rich literary production of the nineteenth-century United States? We will endeavor to answer these questions by focusing on those literary texts that look far beyond the nation’s clearly defined geopolitical and territorial boundaries. In particular, we attend to how these terms are operative in maritime narratives, for it well may be that it is in water’s transient spaces, rather than on land, that American writers conceive of the limit cases and rich possibilities of race, nation, and empire in the US project.

English 560 | 19th Century American Literature:
U.S. Literatures in the Americas

American literary studies over the past twenty to thirty years have undergone dramatic changes, and arguably the field finds itself at an exciting and potentially revolutionary moment in the early years of the twenty-first century. Gender, race, ethnic, and women’s studies helped to transform the canon during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and new developments in hemispheric, transatlantic, and transnational studies have raised questions about the very viability of American literary studies.

Questions this course will consider include: Does it make sense to continue to focus attention on the literature of the United States as constituting, in Richard Poirier’s well-known formulation, a world elsewhere? What is the utility and durability of the idea of nation in a global era? How do we categorize, analyze, and conceptualize our field imaginary once we revisit the geographic assumptions that have so long shaped disciplinary parameters? Given that nations and other old units remain in play even as comparative spaces can change the rules of the game, what productive tensions emerge between these rubrics?

Students.

Mandy Reid
Associate Professor with Tenure, Indiana State University

PhD Dissertation: “A Most Terrible Spectacle: Visualizing Racial Science in American Literature and Culture, 1839-1915,” Defended May 2005.

Elizabeth Fenton
Full Professor with Tenure, University of Vermont

PhD Dissertation: “Comparative Strangers: Anti-Catholicism, Liberalism, and American Literature 1776-1895,” Defended March 2006.

Molly Robey
Associate Professor with Tenure, Illinois Wesleyan University

“Sacred Geographies: Revelation and Nation in 19th-Century U.S.-Holy Land Literature, Defended 2009.

AnaMaria Seglie Clawson
Associate Professor, St. Norbert College

PhD Dissertation: “Sacred Dominion: Anti-Catholicism and the Romance of U.S. Imperialism, 1827-1890,” Defended May 2015.

Abby Goode
Associate Professor with Tenure, Plymouth State University

PhD Dissertation: “Democratic Demographics: A Literary Genealogy of American Sustainability,” Defended April 2016.

Karen Rosenthall
Fellowship & Writing Director, University of Chicago

PhD Dissertation: “Novel Economies: a Literary Pre-History of US Industrial Capitalism,” Defended April 2017.

Emerson Zora Hamsa
Assistant Professor, Auburn University

Admitted to candidacy, December 2018. Research Fields: Late 19th though 20th Century American Literature | African-American Literature | Southern Studies | Critical Cultural Geographies

Joe Carson
Spatial Humanities Initiative Fellow, Humanities Research Center, Rice University

PhD Dissertation: "Savage Arcadia: the American Romance in the Anthropocene," Defended 2019.

David Messmer
Director, Program in Writing & Communication, Rice University

PhD Dissertation: “Aural Fictions: Politics of Sound in African American Writing from the Civil War to Civil Rights,” Defended 2009.