I’m an assistant professor of English and Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies at Texas Christian University, where I specialize in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature, critical race and ethnic studies, and American cultural studies. My articles have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as American Literature, American Quarterly, Contemporary Literature, Critical Inquiry, and Modern Fiction Studies. While serving as the managing editor of LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, I edited and introduced the special issue “Literary Counterhistories of US Exceptionalism” (2014). I have also contributed essays and op-eds to the Los Angeles Reviews of Books, the Dallas Morning News, and the Austin American-Statesman.

I’m currently working on two book projects. My first project, Empire of Defense: Race and the Cultural Politics of Permanent War, traces a cultural history of national defense and racialization––through state documents, novels, films, memorials, and news media––from the formation of the national security state in the late 1940s to the counterterror wars of the twenty-first century. My second project, Whiteness on the Edge of Town: Veteran America and White Racial Politics since Vietnam, identifies the Vietnam vet as the protagonist of a new white racial politics who emerged as a rare site of consensus between liberals and conservatives in the post–civil rights era.

At TCU, I’m a core member of the Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies Program and an affiliate member of the Women and Gender Studies Program. My research has been supported by a Mellon Sawyer Seminar Fellowship from the University of California, Irvine, a First Book Institute Fellowship from Pennsylvania State University, and an OpEd Project Fellowship from the University of California, Merced. I completed my PhD in 2015 at the University of Connecticut.