Research + Scholarship

My scholarly research interests lie at the intersection of material culture, the commodification of identity, the body, fashion and sartoriality, and literature/literary studies, and are informed by my background in 19th/20th-century American and African-American literature, literary theory, visual culture, modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, novels of passing, gender and sexuality studies, women’s studies, aestheticism and dandyism, flånerie, and working class studies. My work investigates intentional (rather than incidental) references to clothing and dress, sartorial emulation, strategies of sartorial display—like passing or dandyism—department store virtual merchandising, shopping, consumerism, and mannequins. Recent published scholarship on F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway examine new ways of understandings how fashion mediates masculine gender identity, such as in the dandyism of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fiction. Such research connects both the sartorial as subject matter and sartoriality as an integral component of modernist aesthetics in the novel. This interest in fashion’s relationship to identity and modernist formal innovation has generated a parallel interest in re-theorizing the existence of a 20th-century, post-war, flâneur figure.

My professionalization plans include publication of a book about sartorial modernism: Fashioning Identity in the Modernist Novel. A second project currently underway, Modern “Man of the Crowd”: Hemingway’s Post-War Flâneur, explores the evolution of the pre-war flâneur that art historians and cultural studies critics have argued became outmoded at the end of the nineteenth-century. My work locates heirs of the pre-war flâneur figure in various incarnations of the post-war journalist-soldier figure that appears in much of Hemingway’s fiction, and including Hemingway himself. I have several articles in various stages of submission process: “No Place Like Home: Hemingway’s Uncanny Homelands,” which identifies a theory of place and/as home in Hemingway’s life and writing is currently under review; “Sartorial Primal Scenes” examines pivotal sartorial moments in the lives of American writers like Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, and Ernest Hemingway; “Modernism’s Underwear” explores the meaning and political significance of feminine undergarments as metaphor for the literary “battle of the sexes” in work by T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Rhys; “Was Sartorial Student–Am Now Sartorial Stylist: the Evolution of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Sartorial Style” is an archival project that examines exactly what its title suggests.

My working class background, and time teaching in the Chicago Public Schools compels my interest in sartoriality and social class identity in the work of women authors from similar backgrounds, such as Agnes Smedley, Jean Rhys, and Carolyn Steedman. That said, my teaching interests are not limited to my scholarship. I am interested in developing, whether as first-year writing seminars, general education, or literature, courses on such topics: Wall Street,  Consumerism, the American Dream/American Nightmare, Vision-Visual Culture-Ocularcentrism, Doppelgängers + Doubles, Fashion + Mannequins, Expatriate American Writers in Paris, The Great Gatsby: Myth to Meme, Walking: Pilgrimage to Psychogeography, and a counter-narrative American Literature survey: From Plymouth Rock to Standing Rock.