Carnegie Mellon University

Graduate Student, Literary and Cultural Studies

Thesis Title: Intellectual Proletarians in the Student Factory: Criticism of the University, 1900-1930

About

I am at work on my dissertation, “Intellectual Proletarians in the Student Factory: Criticism of the University, 1900-1930,” which examines criticism in periodicals, newspapers, monographs, policy documents, and novels, and uses three key figures (James McKeen Cattell, Thorstein Veblen, and Upton Sinclair) as case studies to trace the early genealogy of U.S. university critique.  It presents a cultural history and textual analysis of the competing claims and critical strategies employed by the professors, administrators, students, and other stakeholders who worked to shape the emerging institution.  I also write about contemporary academic labor issues, and have published on graduate student work and undergraduate internship labor in the minnesota review, Academe, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Cultural Logic.  The Critical Pulse: Thirty-Six Credos by Contemporary Critics, a collection that I co-edited with Jeffrey J. Williams is forthcoming from Columbia University Press in fall 2012.  My teaching focuses on late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century American literature, with emphases on naturalism, popular fiction, and cultural theory, as well as the history of the university.  I have also developed composition courses on topics such as the “corporate university” and Millennial students.  Currently I serve as a member of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Profession, and I administer GradSource, an online resource center for graduate students in English at Carnegie Mellon.  I was honored recently to be the recipient of the 2011 Department of English Graduate Student Teaching Award and the 2011-12 Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences Graduate Student Teaching Award, as well as the Annette Kolodny Award presented by the Women's Caucus for the Modern Languages for an outstanding grad student presentation at the MLA annual convention (for my paper "Marking Time-to-Degree: Age Talk and the Graduate School Decade).