B.A. 1970 Amherst College
M.A. 1972 Claremont Graduate School
Ph.D. 1975 Claremont Graduate School
On the PSU faculty since 1984

COURSES: American literature (intro. to grad. level) from “beginnings” to WWI; Neopragmatism; Early American Fiction; American Poetry; Rhetorics of American literature; Nineteenth-Century Women's Novels; Emerson and Dewey; Henry and William James; The Early Post-Structuralist Writers; Detective Fiction, American Literary Study as Critical Theory

FIELDS: American Literature to WWI; Theories of American Literature; Critical Theory

SPECIAL INTERESTS/ AUTHORS: Transnational Literature in English, Pragmatism and Neopragmatism, Emerson, Henry James, Nineteenth-century Fiction, the Invention of the (Post)Modern, Theories and History of Literary Scholarship

SELECTED FELLOWSHIPS AND ACADEMIC HONORS
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, 1994-95
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, 1987-88
Faculty Research Grants (5), Portland State University, 1985-91
Fulbright-Hays Senior Professorship, Regensburg, Germany, 1982-83
National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, 1980

BOOKS
The American Ideal: Literary History as a Worldly Activity (Oxford University Press, 1991—selected for reissue, Oxford, Fall, 2001)
Transcendent Reason (Florida State, 1982)

IN PROGRESS
Unfounded Accounts, a study of the intersections between politics, aesthetics and the invention of Literary Study

EDITIONS/COLLECTIONS
The American Renaissance: New Dimensions, special issue, The Bucknell Review, Spring, 1983
Selected Works of James Marsh, Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 3 vols., 1976

SELECTED ARTICLES
“Pragmatism and Reading: Naturalizing Uncle Tom's Cabin,”  REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 15 (1999), 61-74.
“Who I Was: Ethnic Identity and American Literary Ethnocentrism,” in Criticism and the Color Line: Essays on Race and the Discourse of Revisonism in American Literary Studies, Henry Wonham, ed. (Rutgers U. Press, Spring, 1996).
“American Literature/Ethnic Literature,” in Writing Nation/Writing Region, Theo D'haen, ed., (Publication of the Netherlands American Studies Association, Spring, 1996).
“Cultural Rhetoric and the Promise of Pragmatist Histories,” in Reconceptualizing American Literary/Cultural Studies, William Cain, ed. (Garland Press, Spring, 1996).
“After American Literature,” American Literary History, 4, 3 (Fall, 1992), 539-549.
“Changing the World: the Rhetoric of Revisionism,” ADE Bulletin, 101 (Spring, 1992), 61-68.
“The Constraints of History: Revision and Revolution in American Literary Studies,” College English, 50, 6, 605-22.
“The New Orthodoxy: Ideology and the Institution of American Literary Scholarship,” as the "Extra" Essay in American Literature, 59, 4, 626-38.
“Reading Emerson/Writing History,” The Centennial Review, 30, 4, (Fall, 1986),431-51.
“In Dubious Battle: American Literary Criticism and Post-Structuralist Theory,” in The American Renaissance.
“James Marsh to John Dewey: The Fate of Transcendentalist Philosophy in American Education,” ESQ, 24 (Winter, 1978), 1-11.
“James Marsh's American Aids to Reflection: Influence Through Ambiguity,” New England Quarterly, 49, I (1976), 27-45.
“James Marsh: Transcendental Puritan,” ESQ, 21 (Summer, 1975), 126-36.

SELECTED PAPERS AND PANELS
“Talking of Slavery and Scholarship,” Conference on “The Influence of Pragmatism on American Literature and Culture Studies,” Free University of Berlin, Germany, Nov., 1998.
“Pragmatism and the New Cultural Criticism,” Futures of American Studies Conference, Dartmouth College, Summer, 1997.
“Ethnic Identity and American Literary Ethnocentrism,” invited lecture to the Symposium of Literature and History Faculties, University of California, Irvine, 1994.
“American Literary Identity: An Exercise in Regionalism,” Netherlands American Studies Association, Middleburg, The Netherlands, 1994.
“The Rhetoric of Revisionism: An 'American' Genre,” Research Symposium in American Studies, J. F. K. Institute, Free University of Berlin, 1994.

PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES
1990-    Referee, Oxford, Duke, Virginia, Hopkins Presses
1989-    Consultant, Annenberg/Corporation for Public Broadcasting Project
1986-    Referee, College English, Nineteenth Century Contexts