Specializations
Modern and Contemporary Poetry; Working-Class Literature; Modernism; Adult and Community Education; Labor and Higher Education
Publications
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You Work Tomorrow: An Anthology of American Labor Poetry, 1929-1941 (2007).
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“Neither Necessary nor Sufficient: Community Education and the Fight against Poverty.” Pedagogy. (forthcoming)
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“‘Thinking/ Of the Freezing Poor’: The Suburban Counter-Pastoral in William Carlos Williams’s Early Poetry.” William Carlos Williams Review. (forthcoming)
- “United Auto Writers: Poetry from the United Auto Workers, 1937-1939." Reconstruction 8.1. (forthcoming)
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“A Lost Art of Work: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems.” American Literature (September 2007).
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“The Justice Poetry of Miriam Tane.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. 23: 1 (2006): 44-59.
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“Thinking about Students as Workers.” Inside Higher Education. December 11, 2006.
Work in Progress
“Modern American Poetry and the Labor Question.” This book-in-progress documents how several of the best known modern poets—T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay—put the poor and working class to their own non-Marxist poetic and political ends. It does so in order to answer a larger set of questions about how literature and literary criticism, then and now, has confronted (or dodged) the ethical challenges posed by poverty and alienation.
Teaching
Modern and Contemporary Poetry; Working-Class Literature; Modernism.
Recent Courses: English 553: The Long 1930s; English 274: The Literature of Poverty, the Poverty of Literature; English 241: Beginnings of Modern Poetry; English 242: Poetry since 1940; English 213: The Literature and Culture of Modernism
I am also the coordinator of The Odyssey Project, a free, college-accredited course in the humanities offered to low-income adults in the Champaign-Urbana community. For more information, see http://www.iprh.uiuc.edu/odyssey_project.htm
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University of Illinois