I have taught at Elizabethtown College since the Fall of 1981. Prior to that I taught in the Department of English Language and Literature at Central Michigan University. Earlier, I taught in the American Thought and Language Department at Michigan State University. I was trained to be a scholar and teacher of American and modern literature and those two areas remain my passion. I wrote my dissertation on the modern American novelist John Dos Passos. I also have strong research interests in the work of Willa Cather and Toni Morrison.

My co-curricular passion is performance. My first experiences as a performer were in music. I played in rock bands in high school and college and performed as a singer-songwriter while in graduate school. I still occasionally perform music in public, but in recent years I have become more involved with theatrical performance. I have appeared in over thirty plays since the early 1990s, including works by Euripides, Shakespeare, Molière, Gogol, Ibsen, Wilde, Giraudoux, Brecht, Miller, and Stoppard.  Among my favorite roles have been Pyotor  Ivanovich Bobchinski in Gogol's Inspector General, Frank Strang in Peter Shaffer's Equus, Duperret in Peter Weiss' Marat/Sade, Orgon in Molière's Tartuffe, Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, and Friar Laurence in his Romeo and Juliet.

My interest in theater eventually led to a  scholarly and teaching interest in performance studies. For several years I taught a course entitled Shakespeare Through Performance as well as an introductory film course. While curricular changes have meant that I no longer teach those courses, I retain a scholarly interest in the relationship between the written text and its perfomance(s).

    My scholarly interests include:       

•  the social construction of race in American literature and culture, 1840-1930
•  time and history in modern American literature
•  performance studies: Shakespeare in performance; film studies, text and performance

          The Hill: an Exploration of Community in Poetry, Song, and Movement.  Produced by
                      the Garet's Hope Committee, Lancaster PA, April 2002. Director: Steve Schwilk.

Causality and Narrativity in [Willa Cather’s] My Antonia and [Toni Morrison’s] The Bluest Eye. Presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Kansas City, November 2000.

Up in Smoke: Narrative Theory in Smoke and The English Patient. Presented at the annual meeting of the Popular Culture Association,  Orlando, April 1998.

Finding Hamlet. (with Michael Sevareid) Produced by Elizabethtown College, August 1997 and1998. Director: Michael Sevareid.

“’The Site of Memory’: Narrative and Meaning in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Midwestern Miscellany XXV (1996), 51-62.

Raising the Dead: The Specter of the Past in [William Kennedy’s] Ironweed and [Toni Morrison’s] Beloved. Presented at the annual symposium of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, East Lansing, May 1994.

Columbus and the New Wor(l)ds: William Carlos Williams and the Myth of Discovery. Presented at the annual Conference in Modern Literature, East Lansing, October 1992

“Fatal Attraction: The Politics of Terror.” In “Fatal Attraction: Feminist Perspectives,” a special section of The Journal of Popular Culture, 26 (Winter 1992), 83-89.

 “The Collapse of Faith and the Failure of Language: John Dos Passos and the Spanish Civil War.” In Rewriting the Good Fight: Critical Essays on the Literature of the Spanish Civil War. Ed. Frieda Brown, et. al. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1989, pp. 215-228.

“’When the Mind Remembers All’: Dream and Memory in Theodore Roethke’s ‘North American Sequence.’” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 21 (Spring 1988), 28-37.

Ellen Glasgow, Willa Cather, and the Canon of Modern American Literature. Presented at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, San Francisco, December 1987.

“The Allusive Past: Historical Perspective in The Great Gatsby.” College Literature, 12 (Spring 1985), 153-162.

• John Bryant, ed.  American Literature.Pearson Custom Library.
• Mark Twain. Huckleberry Finn. (Studies in Critical Controversy). St. Martin's.
• William Dean Howells. The Rise of  Silas Lapham. Penguin.
• Henry James. "Daisy Miller" and Other Stories."  Oxford UP.
• Stephen Crane. "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets" and Selected Stories. Signet.
• Edith Wharton. Ethan Frome. Signet.
• Kate Chopin. "The Awakening" and Selected Stories. Penguin

EN 185, Introduction to Professional Writing