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A complete list of my scholarly presentations is included in my CV, but you can read a bit more about them (mostly cribbed from abstracts and proposals) on this page.  If you have any questions about these projects, please feel free to get in touch via the contact page.

“Replete With Unexpected Coherence”: Pale Fire and Émigré Experience
Société Française Vladimir Nabokov, June 2019 (forthcoming)

In an unpublished 1963 exchange with Jacob Bronowski, Vladimir Nabokov wrote that he was “not interested in social situations or problems,” and that exile was, for him, “limited to a purely personal ache.”  Yet close attention to Nabokov’s work casts doubt on his insistence that his art was divorced from the mundanities of time, place, and the action of history.  While the weight of critical attention paid to his 1962 novel Pale Fire tends to address ostensibly ahistorical matter — the novel’s thematic weave, its sly algebraic enigmas, its Shadean clues and Kinbotean riddles – consideration of Pale Fire as informed by Nabokov’s distinctly thorny relationship with Russian émigré communities remains comparatively under-explored.  “Replete With Unexpected Coherence” argues that Pale Fire may be read as wry Nabokovian criticism of certain Russian émigré attitudes that colorfully sentimentalized an Imperial Russia irretrievably lost to the 1919 revolutions and the subsequent consolidation of Soviet power.  This criticism, I contend, is levied with clues more readily intelligible to Russian émigrés than to non-émigré readers, and that it is expressed in Pale Fire by coded jabs at the sensation in Europe and America over Anna Anderson’s claim to the identity of Anastasia Romanov – and, by extension, to the survival of the Imperial line.  The clues linking Pale Fire to the Romanov survival controversy run through familiar touchstones of interpretive criticism: the tangled identities Charles Kinbote and Vseslav Botkin, Gradus’ newspaper clippings,  the hidden crown jewels, and more.  Rather than a totalizing interpretive key to the novel’s riddles, this presentation investigates the echoes of exilic experience and lived history in Pale Fire as it underscores one of the novel’s chief marvels: its perpetual invitation, rather than discouragement, of fresh avenues of critical inquiry.

Fear and Loathing in the Post-Certainty Milieu
Panel Chair – NeMLA, April 2018

Early in his coverage of the 1972 American presidential campaign, Hunter S. Thompson notified his readers that he was abandoning all pretense of journalistic objectivity. “Don’t bother to look for it here,” he cautions. “With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.” With this warning, Thompson was not divorcing himself from truth-telling; rather, as William Stephenson explains, in refusing to play by the correct rules of conventional journalism, Thompson “turned away from the ‘truth’ determined by metropolitan editors and their establishment paymasters, and lit out for his own frontier.”

What Stephenson identifies as “a form of active resistance to literary, journalistic, and social convention” describes not just the extreme style of Gonzo journalism but much of its enduring popular appeal. Only in the last five years, however, has serious academic attention been paid to Thompson, Gonzo stylistics, and their political resonances. Winston’s Gonzo Text (2014), and McEneaney’s Fear, Loathing, and the Birth of Gonzo (2016) echo Stephenson’s assessment in Gonzo Republic (2012) that Gonzo destabilizes conventional narratives by derailing the apparatus by which (we are told) truth may be recognized and disseminated.

This panel examines Thompson and Gonzo journalism in light of the recent global rise in populism, reactionism, and fascism. What do Thompson and other New Journalists offer for our post-certainty milieu? When disregard for objectivity may be weaponized more easily than ever by interests across the political spectrum, how does Gonzo resistance provide an avenue for truth-telling? How does the political moment problematize experimental approaches to mimesis? How does the Gonzo approach, disseminated through a variety of other media, continue to advance forms of resistance?

Learning to Teach (Together): Team-Teaching, Pedagogy, & Community at the Graduate Level
Collaborative presentation with Kathryn Hendrickson – NeMLA, March 2017

Collaborative teaching, in all its various permutations and applications, is generally regarded as beneficial to teachers’ pedagogical development and professionalization as well as to student learning.  The benefits — and challenges — of collaborative teaching among graduate instructors, however, is comparatively under-researched and therefore less well understood.  In the spring 2013 semester, we launched a one-semester project designed to study authority dynamics in the first-year writing classroom.  Using a cooperative pedagogical model, we sought to destabilize the familiar locus of authority in the single-teacher classroom to create a decentralized, diffused — and therefore much more student-centered, student-led, and student-driven model.

In addition to the insights into authority dynamics, our study yielded a number of compelling perspectives on graduate-instructor collaboration and team-teaching, the unique set of challenges (both pedagogical & institutional) facing graduate team-teachers, and the personal and institutional benefits graduate team-teaching can produce.

Fear and Loathing in Two Versions: Observations on a Variorum of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Louisville Conference for Literature & Culture Since 1900, February 2016

First-Year English & Beyond
Collaborative presentation with Dr. Jenn Fishman, Jenna Green Azab, Katie Kirkby, and Saul Lopez.
Wisconsin Council of Teachers of English, October 2016

This collaborative presentation, including both teachers and students, aims to present reflections on the new Rhetoric & Composition curriculum of the Marquette University First-Year English Program.  Teachers can speak to their experience developing and teaching the new course plan and offer samples, handouts, and other materials; their students can speak to their own experience of the new curriculum and offer their reflections on its place in their own scholarly paths.