I’m an assistant professor of English and comparative race and ethnic studies at Texas Christian University, where I teach twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature, critical race and ethnic studies, and American cultural studies. I’m the author of Empire of Defense: Race and the Cultural Politics of Permanent War (University of Chicago Press, 2019), a cultural history of race and national defense from the formation of the Department of Defense in the late 1940s to the long wars of the twenty-first century. I’m currently working on a second book, Whiteness on the Edge of Town: Veteran America and White Racial Politics since Vietnam, which shows how white men––conservative and liberal, hawk and dove, vet and non-vet––transformed the Vietnam War into a staging ground for a post–civil rights white racial reunion.

I have published articles in American Literature, American Quarterly, Contemporary Literature, Critical Inquiry, and Modern Fiction Studies, among other journals, and contributed essays and op-eds to the Austin American-Statesman, the Dallas Morning News, and the Los Angeles Reviews of Books.

At TCU, I’m a core member of the Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies Department and an affiliate member of the Women and Gender Studies Department. I have received support for my research from 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.