I teach a lot of unusual courses and never teach the same course twice. Even when the title is the same, the syllabus is new. It makes my classes a bit unpredictable, but each one has a sense of exploration.

I approach teaching as an intellectual historian and writer. That means I put the readings in context, so students can connect them to material from other courses. I unpack loaded words and jargon, so the class can decide whether or not to accept undelying assumptions. Education involves thinking through a range of perspectives, not just taking on someone else’s version of truth.

The focus and intelligence you need to read this way is hard to achieve. And it takes years for a writer to master his/her approach to a given form. But it’s worth it. No traditional authority wants young people to have these abilities.

They’ll do something unpredictable with them.

• Fool’s Gold (about the theme of the fool or jester in world literature)
• The Nineteenth Century Novel
• Nodes & Networks: Leather: the Meaning of Style.  Spring, 2005.
• Intermediate Poetry.  Fall, 2003.
• Writing Fellows: a seminar in peer-to-peer teaching.
• The Crack’d Looking Glass: Yeats, Joyce and Irish Identity.  Spring, 2002.
• Action Writing. Spring-Fall 2001.

• Transgressive Fiction: The Contemporary Satiric Tradition (Under contract: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
• "The Politics of Emnity: Deconstruction and the New Neoconservatism"
  Revista des Letras v. 49, n. 2 (2009) 
• Identity and Society in American Poetry. Cambria Press, 2008.

As a poet, I am interested in locating the points at which articulation breaks down and gives way to the inarticulable or uknowable. On a perhaps parallel line, my research centers on the reemergence of literary traditions (romanticism, satire) in disguised forms on the contemporary scene. I am writing on the Black Mountain poets, the American Jewish novel, and contemporary satiric fiction.

• The Association of Writers and Writing Programs

• Award of Distinction for my dissertation