Education

B.A. Pennsylvania State University 1979
M.A. University of Michigan 1981
Ph.D. University of Michigan 1989

Academic interests

I am interested broadly in issues of power, negotiation, and community in literature, intertextuality in literature, and cultural hybridity. My most recent work is on post-colonial literature, particularly South African literature and writers J. M. Coetzee and Zoe Wicomb; I have also published and presented conference papers on Athol Fugard (South Africa), Chinua Achebe (Nigeria), Derek Walcott (St. Lucia), and Earl Lovelace (Trinidad).

Teaching

My teaching interests include South African literature and society, 20th-century African literature, British literature to 1800, European classics in translation, Shakespeare, and colonialism in literature.

Awards

2016 Reallocation for Research Grant, IUPUI School of Liberal Arts 2015 Trustees Teaching Award, IUPUI ($2,500) 2008 New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities Fellowship ($21,865)
2006 Trustees Teaching Award, IUPUI ($2,500)
1999 Teaching Excellence Recognition Award, IUPUI ($2,500)
1998 Teaching Excellence Recognition Award, IUPUI ($2,500)
1985 Distinguished Teaching Award nominee, University of Michigan
1979 Phi Kappa Phi member, Penn State
1978 Phi Beta Kappa member, Penn State

GRANTS AND FELLOWSHIPS
2007-08 New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities Fellowship ($22,000)
2006 Faculty Summer Research Fellowship, School of Liberal Arts, IUPUI (for book project _J. M. Coetzee and the Critics_).
2004 Honors Program Research Fellow, Honors Program, IUPUI (for Mentoring an independent research project by student Gerald Laxson; $2,000)
2004 Summer Faculty Fellowship for Integrator Course Development, School of Liberal Arts, IUPUI (South African Literature and Society; $5,000)
1996 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship for 1996-97 (Post-colonial Literature and the Western Tradition; $30,000)
1994 Summer Faculty Research Fellowship, Indiana University-Indianapolis (Colonial Issues in Milton, Dryden, and Denham; $6,000)
1993 NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers, Albert Wertheim, Director (Contemporary Literature from Africa, the West Indies, and the Pacific; $4,000)
1992 Summer Faculty Fellowship for Course Development, Honors Program, Indiana University-Indianapolis (Rereading the Classics: Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in the Western Tradition; $2,000)

Publications

2016 “The Real McCloy: Fiction, History, and the Real in Zoe Wicomb’s ‘The One That Got Away,’” Research in African Literatures, volume 47, issue 4 (Winter 2016): 54-70 1999 "Principle and Practice: Underpinnings of Cultural Violence in Achebe's Things Fall Apart," College Literature, Volume 29, Number 1 (Winter 1999): 69-79 (Republished 2010)
1998 “’Where is Hope?’: Coetzee's Rewriting of Dante in Age of Iron,” English in Africa, Volume 25, Number 1 (May 1998) 27-42 
1997 "Unstable Identities: Allusion and Hybridity in Walcott's Omeros," Journal of Caribbean Literatures 1:1 (Spring 1997): 53-66 
1995 "'Master Harold' and the Bard: Education and Succession in Fugard and Shakespeare," Comparative Drama, Volume 29, Number 4 (Winter 1995-96): 415-435 
1995 "'Your Pen, Your Ink': Coetzee's Foe, Robinson Crusoe, and the Politics of Parody," Kunapipi Volume 17, Number 3 (1995):86-101 
1995 "The Anarchist's Mirror: Walcott's Omeros and the Epic Tradition," Commonwealth, Volume 17, Number 2 (Spring 1995): 67-81 
1995 "Caesar's Toils: Allusion and Rebellion in Oroonoko," Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Volume 7, Number 3 (April 1995): 239-258. Republished in the collection The Eighteenth-Century English Novel, edited by Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004).

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