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.
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).
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)
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).
