I’m Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. I was a Humanities editor at LARB from 2012 to 2020. I’ve written fiction, criticism, and reviews.
I wrote the novel Pop Apocalypse (Ecco/HarperPerennial, 2009) and co-edited (with Sam Cohen) The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (University of Iowa Press, 2012).
My literary history, Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction, was published in 2016 by Harvard University Press. It’s a study of irony in US fiction after 1945, tracing an arc from Cold War liberal irony through postmodernism and ending at the development of various modes of what I call “postirony.”
Recently, I published The Last Samurai Reread (2022) with the Rereadings series at Columbia University Press. I offer an account of the making of Helen DeWitt’s great 2000 novel, The Last Samurai, alongside an interpretation of the novel. Among other things, it’s an experiment in integrating interview-based methods with literary criticism.
With Georgiana Banita, I co-edited a collection called Artful Breakdowns: The Comics of Art Spiegelman (2023), part of the Tom Inge Series on Comics Artists series published by the University Press of Mississippi.
I’m currently working on a book called “Creator-Owned Comics.” It’s about the rise of an idea of creator-ownership in the world of periodical comics in the 1980s and 1990s. If everything goes as planned, it’ll feature chapters on Dark Horse, Image Comics, Vertigo, Milestone Comics, and direct sales. I’m interested in bringing a Comics Industries/sociology of comics perspective to new readings of various important comics.
I live in Washington, DC.