Degrees

MA - English - Vanderbilt University
MA - English - University of New Hampshire
BA - English - Illinois State University

Research Area

American Film - especially wide-release films, 1970-2000
suburban sprawl, city & regional planning, transportation design & planning
Class in the American suburbs
20th Century American Literature
Cultural studies

Current Research

Dissertation: "The wages of sprawl" Chapter 1: George Babbitt + Edward Soja & Henri Lefebvre + history of suburban transportation and privacy. Chapter 2: Jack Lemmon teaches you how to be a Normal Suburban American (between 1960 and 1993). Chapter 3: Man in the Gray Flannel Suit + Phyllis McGinley + Jean Kerr = worldview that emerges in flicks like Stepford Wives and Falling in Love. Chapter 4: American Beauty, Family Man, Office Space, subUrbia and the built environment's role in gentrification, nativism, and homophobia. Chapter 5: Late-nineties nostalgia for the 1970s? An ecocritical account of the suburban built environment.
Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story as a restaging of Steve Coogan's attempt to become a star in America.
"Sewer gators," infrastructure, and race-class connections in Pynchon's V. and Wright's "The Man Who Lived Underground"
Frederick Douglass, Daniel Defoe, pirate articles and freedom's home outside US/UK boundaries.
And two larkish ongoing projects: 1. A thing about the Ghostbusters and Predator movies (more like "stuff I say at cocktail parties," but I don't go to cocktail parties, so I may be forced to write it). 2. Richard Nixon (boo~!), football, and "horserace" political coverage, which is part of my fixation on the fictional lives of American presidents.

Current Courses

In Spring 2008, I'll be teaching "I Hate My Job and Want to Die," my valentine to office drudgery. The course will include Then We Came to the End, one chapter from Bright Lights Big City, five pages from that "book" Indecision, Clockwatchers, Office Space, and a healthy number of Albert Brooks films. Critical readings will include Marx, Althusser, Gramsci, and Ehrenreich. Please, no aspiring MBAs. And if you're a wannabe MBA Cubs fan, please stop. You're hurting the children.

Current Positions

I play point guard during the grad student pickup games which are more like satire than actual basketball. But I really want to play center.
1. The coracohumeral ligament is torn. 2. Small tears of the anterosuperior and posterior glenoid labrum. 3. Evidence of prior injury to the superior and middle glenohumeral ligaments and bicipiral sling. 4. Several small degenerative subchondral cysts are noted within the greater humeral tuberosity ajacent to the distal infraspinatus tendon insertion.

Previous Positions

A/K/A the "two jobs to pay the bills" section
2007, 2008 Vanderbilt Program for Talented Youth Summer Academy, Film Studies Instructor
2007 WAVU, Film Studies Instructor
2006, 2007 PAVE Program, Vanderbilt University School of Engineering, Technical Writing Instructor
2004-2007 Graduate Fellow - Center for the Americas
2002-2003 UNH, Graduate teaching assistant
2001 PRS, Junior executive search consultant
1992-2001 Classic Cinemas Cinema 12, Box office cashier, projection booth, answering machine voice
1994-1997 Northwest Structural Steel, Shop hand, field erector, draftsman
1975-1994 Mom & Dad, driveway shoveler, lawn mower, floor mopper, dishwasher

Professional Societies

Modern Language Association
Society for Cinema and Media Studies

Professional Honors

Vanderbilt University Center for the Americas - Graduate Fellowship 2005-2007
Anna Keaton Award - Outstanding English Major ISU

Publications

"Of Ref Bumps, DQs, and Dusty Finishes: The Smart Mark's Imperfect Enjoyments" in Someone Ring the Damn Bell Wrestling and Sports Entertainment (forthcoming)

Biography

I was born at home, on a couch, in a trailer park in Elgin, Illinois. I enjoyed a tremendously average upbringing in the suburbs of Chicago where my father worked as a welder/fitter in a structural steel fabrication plant and my mother had many jobs - my favorite was the midnight shift in a donut shop (she brought a dozen day-olds home every morning). As a callow youth, I played soccer and wrote for the school paper in Barrington, Illinois. I worked in a movie theater, where ten years of free movies helped me to fall in love with cinema. After a brief and unsuccessful semester at the University of Iowa (callow youth, remember), I worked in steel fabrication and installation for four years. After almost losing two fingers and a leg, I decided that perhaps I should give college another try. Four years later I graduated from ISU. I learned to drive so that I could move to New Hampshire. In New Hampshire I met Jennifer, who exhausts my capacity to utter superlatives. After taking my MA, I followed Jennifer to Nashville. We've spent the last five years here with our dogs Clarence and Emma, and our cats Armstrong, Isa, Castor, and Pollux. In June, Jennifer will take the animals to Christchurch, New Zealand, where she will teach at the University of Canterbury. I will again head south to join her, six months and one PhD later.

Miscellaneous

The charms of Dragon Gate's Florida Brothers will convince you to love wrestling - links at the top. You don't need to speak Japanese to understand what's going on, although their "butchering" of two languages in one promo is good stuff. Their matches beautifully demonstrate the performativity of wrestling. Don't worry wrestling-averse friend! It's comedy wrestling, so the performers are more in on the joke than you are. If you dig the Florida Brothers, try Ebessan too (he's even more meta).
I'm also fairly confident in saying that the pullaway crane shot at the end of the Freaks and Geeks pilot episode manages to be simultaneously cliched and transcendant. And...While I write with my left hand, I perform most other tasks with my right hand because I was taught by right-handeds.