I conducted interdisciplinary research in U.S. history, media, and popular literature for more than a decade and presented it to both academic and nonacademic audiences. During the COVID shutdown I found myself drawn more to creating content for Tabletop Roleplaying Games (TTRPGs) and developing genre fiction rather than studying or analyzing it.
Science Fiction and Digital Humanities
I combine my deep knowledge of speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, horror, and related subgenres) with digital humanities methods and approaches. Digital Humanities has the potential to reach a much greater audience and to employ tools that expand a line of inquiry beyond the close reading of a relative handful of texts. However, presenting scholarship online can be difficult as so much of the material remains undigitized and within copyright limitations.
Publications
Comics and graphic novels
I wrote on the relationship between reality and fantasy narratives in graphic novels in a volume of Salem Press’s Critical Insights series: “The Reality/Fantasy Narrative and the Graphic Novel” in Critical Insights: The Graphic Novel, edited by Gary Hoppenstand for Grey House Publishing/Salem Press. I explore the depictions of characters who are anthropomorphized abstract concepts such as Death, Dream, and Desire or Chaos, Order, and Eternity in the semi-mimetic “reality” of superhero comics. My work also appears in a collection of scholarship on the Iron Man comic series, The Ages of Iron Man: Essays on the Armored Avenger in Changing Times, edited by Joseph J. Darowski for McFarland & Co. My chapter is “Iron Icarus: Comics Futurism and the Man-Machine System,” a study of how the comic series has dealt with questions of cybernetics and suggests that humans must remain in control rather than reduce human oversight of advanced weapons systems.
Apocalyptic Science Fiction
I have published two articles that contribute to the field of American Studies in their exploration of civil rights, national security, and the growing anxiety of biowarfare and pandemics. “The Cain Mutiny: Reflecting the faces of Military Leadership in a Time of Fear,” which appears in the collection Cylons in America, is an analysis of military and civilian leadership during a time of prolonged national emergency and considers the tension between the competing goals of providing security and defending civil liberties. My second article “Zombie Apocalypse: Plague and the End of the World in Popular Culture,” appeared in End of Days: Essays on the Apocalypse from Antiquity to Modernity, a collection edited by Karolyn Kinane and Michael A. Ryan (McFarland 2009). This article considers notions of plague and the unquiet dead, and tracks the evolution of these themes in contemporary popular culture as the transformation of the vampire myth through scientific rationalization in Richard Matheson’s I am Legend and the recent films it inspired that replace supernatural agencies with scientifically plausible explanations for the end of the world by drawing on recurrent fears of contagion, infection, and death.
Dissertation
My dissertation, Shattered States: Catastrophe, Collapse, and Decline in American Science Fiction, completed under the direction of Dr. Gary Hoppenstand, explored the destruction and collapse of the United States and the failure to preserve its democratic institutions in recent American post-apocalyptic speculative texts. Investigating the connections between literature, media, and social issues in late-20th century American culture, I applied literary and media criticism, cultural studies, and historical analysis toward developing a composite of American culture incorporating a variety of subcultures and communities, especially those that blur along the borders of identity including gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. By focusing on popular culture, and more specifically genre literature and media, I engaged with a discourse that considers the fractures within American society and the possible failures of its civil liberties. Studying these apocalyptic metaphors helped me to chart the expanding identity and cultural conflicts in the U.S. during the late-20thcentury as social divisions and tensions that suggest the declining potential of the “American Dream” against an embattled political and cultural identity that remains bound to World War II triumphalism and Cold War fears.