Chesapeake Bay regional literature and culture; film studies
I was born in Washington, D.C.; grew up in Bethesda, Maryland; vacationed with my family on the Delaware coast; and went to college in Tidewater Virginia. Perhaps it is for that reason that my initial scholarly interest in literature and culture of the American South changed over time into a more specific interest in literature and culture of the Chesapeake Bay region. My 30 years' teaching experience at colleges and universities in Maryland, Illinois, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and now Virginia has deepened my interest in American regionalism generally. I have a particular interest in the work of Edgar Allan Poe, and have also published in the fields of film studies and Civil War studies.
"Baskerville's Antecedents: Ratiocination and Animality in the Work of Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle" (book project)
"Andersonville Revisited: The Civil War's Most Notorious Prisoner-of-War Camp, in a 1950's Novel and a 1990's Mini-Series" (article project)
"Berlin’s Own Rip Van Winkle: The Washington Irving Connection in Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye, Lenin!” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 53.4 (November 2017).
“SRSD for RAFT Writing.” Design Principles for Teaching Effective Writing. E-Book. Amsterdam: Brill Editions, 2017.
“California in Extremis: A West Coast Setting and 1960’s Anxiety in The Birds.” Hitchcock Annual 20 (2015).
“District of Tomorrow: Science Fiction Films in Washington, D.C.” World Film Locations: Washington, D.C. Ed. Katherine Larsen. Chicago: Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press, 2015.
“Capital of Fear: The Washington, D.C., Suspense Film.” World Film Locations: Washington, D.C. Ed. Katherine Larsen. Chicago: Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Nyberg Grant, 2004. In cooperation with four other Millikin University faculty members, applied for and received a grant involving collaborative summer work toward standardization of Critical Writing 1 assignments around issues of critical literacy. Awarded $2500.
English 101 (Composition)
English 201 (Reading and Writing About Texts)
English 302-M (Advanced Composition -- Multidisciplinary)
English 302-S (Advanced Composition -- Social Sciences)
Ph.D., University of Maryland, 1996
M.F.A., University of Maryland, 1991
B.A., College of William & Mary, 1983
2017 “Centaurs in Pennsylvania: Classical Mythology and the Mid-Atlantic Landscape in John Updike’s The Centaur.” Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture conference, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
2016 “The Berlin Summer of Thomas Wolfe: The ‘I Have a Thing to Tell You’ Section of You Can't Go Home Again, and Wolfe’s Pre-World War II Impressions of Nazi Germany.” Appalachian Studies Association conference, Shepherdstown, West Virginia.
2015 “Calibans of the South: Faulkner’s Joe Christmas, Styron’s Nat Turner, and the Great Unwritten Southern Novel.” Popular Culture in the South conference, Wilmington, North Carolina.
2014 Chaired panel on “Power, Politics, and Public Policy” and delivered paper “The Candidate from the Party of the Self: Silas P. Ratcliffe in Henry Adams’s Democracy: An American Novel.” Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association conference, Baltimore, Maryland.
2013 “A Gettysburg for Novelists: MacKinlay Kantor’s Long Remember and Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels.” Pennsylvania College English Association conference, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.