I teach in both the English and the Art History departments and edit the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Inquiry, a quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. I work particularly on the history and theories of media, visual art, and literature, from the eighteenth century to the present. My work explores the relations of visual and verbal representations in the culture and iconology (the study of images across the media).  In addition to publications resulting from my own research, under my editorship Critical Inquiry has published special issues on public art, psychoanalysis, pluralism, feminism, the sociology of literature, canons, race and identity, narrative, the politics of interpretation, postcolonial theory, and many other topics.

I specialize in American and African-American cultural production in the 20th century. I am currently exploring the influence of architecture and urban planning on literary form alongside the ways that narrative intervenes in our historical and experiential understandings of space. My work also considers a range of objects beyond the literary, considering the ways TV shows hear, journalists see, and class may be felt, and analyzing race's sonic and spatial dimensions. 

I write and teach about global Anglophone and postcolonial literatures, and contemporary transnational culture. Currently, I am exploring these interests in the form of two projects: The first, Continental Drifters, is a book-length exploration of the political, intellectual, and affective influence that the cultural memory of the Holocaust exerts on postcolonial writers preoccupied with migration to Europe from the former colonies after 1945. I am interested in how migration creates unexpected constellations and solidarities between different diasporic communities in postwar Europe, and undoes the seeming fixity of racial or religious identities. I examine how literary works, primarily novels, generate forms and figures with which to think critically about concepts such as assimilation, recognition, and multiculturalism.

I teach, research, and write about hemispheric literatures and cultures of the Americas, principally of the twentieth century. My inquiries have mostly taken place in the fields of indigenous and Latino studies, American literature, poetry and poetics, and environmental criticism, with the following questions focusing my work: How is it that conceptions of difference mediated by literary form(s) create feelings of belonging outside of national paradigms, particularly in kinship networks of race and ethnicity? And how do these values (values of what my colleague at Chicago Marshall Sahlins has sharply termed "cosmographies of difference") shape contestations for power?