Academics

An Edgar Allan Poe scholar with expertise in textual studies and psychoanalytic theory, I have taught literature and writing at Marylhurst University since 2003. Courses I teach include American Literature, Gothic Literature, Science Fiction, Creative Writing, and Video Game Theory. In 2013, I received Marylhurst’s award for Excellence in Teaching & Service.

As an active scholar with diverse interests, I regularly present conference papers and publish several articles each year. Most recently, I presented “The Detective as Melancholic in Ben H. Winters’s Last Detective,” at the Popular Culture Association (PCA) Conference, in Seattle, Washington (March 2016). In 2014, I presented “Killing Without Death in Wars Without Conflicts: The Paradoxical Fantasies of Militarized First-Person Shooter (FPS) Video Games” at the Semiotics Society of America’s annual conference, and “Hard-Boiled Arabian Knight: Walking the Mean Streets of the Budayeen with George Alec Effinger’s Marîd Audran” at the Rocky Mountain MLA meeting in Boise, Idaho. I presented “‘Because you so perfectly understand me’: The Uncanny Doubling of Edgar Allan Poe by his Editor and Literary Executor Rufus W. Griswold” at the 4th International Poe Conference in New York City.