Peer-Reviewed Articles
“The Mismeasure of Sport: Race and the Science of Athletic Performance.” Forthcoming in differences 35, no. 1 (2024).
“Roberto Clemente on the Black/Brown Color Line.” Forthcoming in the Journal of American Studies 57, no. 3 (2023).
“The Great American Baseball Novel: How Literature Invented the National Pastime.” American Literary History 34, no. 4 (2022): 1335–57.
“Antiracism as War.” Representations, no. 156 (2021): 85–114.
“The Race Novel: An Education.” MELUS 45, no. 3 (2020): 1–24.
“The Thin White Line: Veterans and the White Racial Politics of Creative Writing.” American Literature 91, no. 4 (2019): 783–810.
“Like a Refugee: Veterans, Vietnam, and the Making of a False Equivalence.” American Quarterly 71, no. 1 (2019): 83–104. Constance M. Rourke Prize finalist (best article in American Quarterly).
“Military Whiteness.” Critical Inquiry 45, no. 1 (2018): 76–96.
“Dispatches from the Drug Wars: Ishmael Reed, Oscar Zeta Acosta, and the Viet Cong of America.” Modern Fiction Studies 64, no. 1 (2018): 79–103.
“Kicking the Vietnam Syndrome Narrative: Human Rights, the Nayirah Testimony, and the Gulf War.” American Quarterly 69, no. 1 (2017): 71–92.
“The Ethnicization of Veteran America: Larry Heinemann, Toni Morrison, and Military Whiteness after Vietnam.” Contemporary Literature 57, no. 3 (2016): 410–40.
“The Exceptionalist Optics of 9/11 Photography.” Journal of American Studies 50, no. 1 (2016): 185–204.
“The Literary Afterlife of the Korean War.” American Literature 87, no. 1 (2015): 79–105.
“Airport Memory: Recalling Vietnam from the Terminal in Andrew Pham’s Travel Writing.” Criticism 57, no. 2 (2015): 191–210.
“Universality at War: Race, Nation, and Communism in Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go.” African American Review 48, no. 1–2 (2015): 157–73.
“The Visual Apologetics of Philip Roth’s Pastoral America.” Philip Roth Studies 11, no. 2 (2015): 77–94.
“MLK at the LA Riots: Civil Rights, Memory, and Neoliberalism in Charles Johnson’s Dreamer.” Twentieth-Century Literature 60, no. 2 (2014): 197–221.
“Precarious World: Rethinking Global Fiction in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist.” Mosaic 47, no. 3 (2014): 107–22.
“The Sacrificial Enterprise: Negotiating Mutilation in W. D. Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes.” American Literary Realism 46, no. 3 (2014): 210–29.
“Graphic Ethics: Theorizing the Face in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.” College Literature 40, no. 2 (2013): 31–51.
Book Chapter
“The Whiteness of Blue Lives: Race in American Policing.” In A Field Guide to White Supremacy, edited by Kathleen Belew and Ramón A. Gutiérrez, 304–11. Berkeley: University of California Press in 2021.
Special Issues
Editor with Amira Rose Davis. “The Body Issue: Sports and the Politics of Embodiment.” Special issue, forthcoming in American Quarterly 75, no. 3 (2023).
Editor with Donald E. Pease. “Literary Counterhistories of US Exceptionalism.” Special issue, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 25, no. 2 (2014).
Public Writing
“Dunk Days: On Theresa Runstedtler’s Black Ball.” Los Angeles Review of Books, March 19, 2023.
“The Racial Politics of National Defense.” Los Angeles Review of Books, June 15, 2019.
“The Philosophy of Creative Writing.” Los Angeles Review of Books, February 25, 2019.
“The Thin White Line.” Los Angeles Review of Books, November 19, 2018.
“The Surprising Roots of Recent White Extremism.” Los Angeles Review of Books, April 9, 2018.
“Post-Traumatic Whiteness: How Vietnam Veterans Became the Basis for a New White Identity Politics.” Los Angeles Review of Books, November 21, 2017.
“A New New Man: Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark Turns Twenty-Five.” Los Angeles Review of Books, August 17, 2017.
“How America Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Drone.” Austin American-Statesman, August 2, 2017.
“Trump Taps a Long U.S. Cultural History of Pitting Immigrants against Veterans.” Dallas Morning News, July 10, 2017.
Book Reviews
Review of Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present, by Theodore Martin. Modern Fiction Studies 65, no. 2 (2019): 355–58.
Review of The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen: From Sokol’niki Park to Chicago’s South Side, by Kate A. Baldwin; and Reading America: Citizenship, Democracy, and Cold War Literature, by Kristin L. Matthews. American Literature 90, no. 3 (2018): 664–66.
Review of Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the U.S. Racial Imagination in Brown and White, by Lee Bebout; and Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects, by Stephanie Li. Critical Inquiry 44, no. 4 (2018): 791–93.
Review of Cold War Friendships: Korea, Vietnam, and Asian American Literature, by Josephine Nock-Hee Park. MELUS 42, no. 2 (2017): 203–5.
Review of Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature, by Rebecca L. Walkowitz. Modern Fiction Studies 63, no. 1 (2017): 169–71.
Review of Distant Wars Visible: The Ambivalence of Witnessing, by Wendy Kozol. Critical Inquiry 42, no. 3 (2016): 714–16.
Review of Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity, by Neda Atanasoski. MELUS 40, no. 3 (2015): 205–7.
“The Global Remaking of the American Political Novel.” Review of Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century, by Caren Irr. Contemporary Literature 55, no. 2 (2014): 430–37.
Review of No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives, by Steven Belletto. Modern Fiction Studies 60, no. 2 (2014): 390–93.
“Narratives of Exception in the Warfare State.” Introduction to “Literary Counterhistories of US Exceptionalism,” edited by Joseph Darda, 80–87. Special issue, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 25, no. 2 (2014).
“Old Left, New Class: Literary Anxiety in the Consumers’ Republic.” Review of Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post–World War II American Fiction, by Stephen Schryer; Hip Figures: A Literary History of the Democratic Party, by Michael Szalay; and American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War, by Alan M. Wald. Minnesota Review, no. 82 (2014): 151–60.
“When Is Postwar?” Review of War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences, by Mary L. Dudziak; Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government, by James T. Sparrow; and How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey across America, by Jon Wiener. American Quarterly 65, no. 4 (2013): 639–48.
Review of Constructing the Enemy: Empathy/Antipathy in U.S. Literature and Law, by Rajini Srikanth. MELUS 38, no. 3 (2013): 175–76.