Research
I’m finishing up my dissertation project on the figure of the war correspondent. I try to show how the form of war correspondence and the figure of the war correspondent achieve their political authority by navigating familiar genres and public tastes in times of rapid technological change. With the ultimate goal of presenting a theory on the making of U.S. imperialism, I work “genealogically” to trace war correspondence, beginning with the sensationalist travel writing of Herman Melville and ending with the realist and romantic fiction of the professional correspondents Stephen Crane and Richard Harding Davis. In between, I explore the interplay of technologies of representation, gender politics, and racial subjugation as depicted in the representations of various “small wars” and the Civil War. By the end of the nineteenth century, eyewitness accounts of war became inextricably related to questions pertaining to the nation as a republic opposed to empire, an empire with republican roots, or an empire with no pretense of republicanism. In each case, an anti-imperial republicanism had to be engaged as a foundational myth of the nation. In uncovering the making of U.S. imperialism as intimately relying on media representations and as engaging national myths of origins, I develop a reading strategy of the forms, figures, and themes that have become common in our daily encounter with war. I hope this work that combines formal analysis with cultural criticism can provide a better understanding of the revolutionary potential embedded in our now familiar uneasiness when encountering the unproblematical co-habitation of violence and gentility in our news.
PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS
“Life of the Image/Text: Reading the Sketches of the Civil War ‘Specials’.” Symposium on the 19th Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression—An annual conference on the 19th century media and free expression, Chattanooga, TN, November 2007. Awarded one the best presentations of the conference.
Review of Gin Before Breakfast: The Dilemma of the Poet in the Newsroom.Published by Jhistory@h-net.msu.edu (Forthcoming in January 2008).
“Biopolitical Convergences: Narmada Bachao Andolan and Homo Sacer.” borderlands e-journal. 5:3, 2005.
Co-authored with Nick Parker.: “Myth-Making and Meaninglessness in Lady in the Water.” Untitled book on the works of film-maker M. Night Shyamalan, to be published in 2007.
“Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms” (review). Journal for Asian American Studies. 10:1, 2007, pp. 110-113.
“Witnessing Empire: The U.S. and Anti-Colonial Imperialism.” [Dis]United Empires: Interdisciplinary Conference on British and United States Imperialism, Kingston, Canada, May 2006.
“The Suspension of Paranoia in Melville’s Typee.” Northeast Modern Language Association. Boston, MA, March 2005.
“Memory’s Address of History in Reading in the Dark and The Journey Home.” Canadian Association for Irish Studies, New Brunswick, Canada, May 2003.