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ASU English Home > Who's Who > Faculty Bio
My work brings together materialist, feminist, and poststructuralist theories with early- and mid-20th century reading research and primary evidence from historical readers and audiences. My work on the middlebrow audience of novelist Dorothy Canfield Fisher has appeared in Reading Acts, eds. Barbara Ryan and Amy Thomas (U Tennessee P, 2002), and a new essay on the media adaptations and reception history of Olive Higgins Prouty’s Stella Dallas is forthcoming in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers (2006). My work in film studies has focused on recovering the forgotten legacy of women filmmakers in the silent era. As a founding member of the Women Film Pioneers Project, I curated the first US retrospective of silent films by women (American Museum of the Moving Image, April 1997) and have worked with colleagues in the U.S. and abroad to support research, education, and preservation efforts. My research has focused especially on the work of director/writer/producer Lois Weber, who was widely regarded by her contemporaries as the second most important director of the 1910s (just after D.W. Griffith and ahead of Cecil B. DeMille). My article on Weber's The Blot, a remarkable depiction of the struggles of impoverished college professors, appeared in Cinema Journal (Fall 1999). My essay, “Women in the Driver’s Seat: The Auto-erotics of Early Women’s Films,” recently appeared in a special issue of Film History devoted to this fascinating and little-known epoch in the development of cinema (Vol. 18.2, 2006). Before coming to ASU in fall 2002, I taught American studies at George Washington University, womens' studies at the University of Houston, and literature and composition at Duke University, Trinity University, and Texas Lutheran University. |
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My
work is centered in critical theory and 20th century American literature,
film, and popular culture. I am particularly interested in issues of
gender, race, and class and in the history of domesticity, work, and
consumer culture. Theoretically, I am interested in documenting the
role that popular fictions play in shaping individual and collective
consciousness by representing and working through cultural anxieties
and by constructing new "structures of feeling"--ideological
templates for perceiving and responding to the world. These interests
come together in my current book manuscript, Melodramas of Everyday Life: Popular Realism and the Making of Middle America, which examines
middlebrow novels, silent film, and other forms of popular culture--including
advertising, popular sociology, and radio soap opera--that played key
roles in dramatizing and consolidating American middle-class consciousness
from the 1920s through the 1940s.