Northern Illinois University
Department of English
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Professional Interests

• Socialism and American Literature
• Twentieth-Century American Poetry
• War Literature, especially of World War I
• The Railroad in Literature and Culture
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois and Carl Sandburg
• Class, Race, Gender and Sexuality in U. S. Literature and Culture

Selected Publications

• American Socialist Triptych: The Literary-Political Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Upton Sinclair, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012.
  “Ralph Chaplin,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 345, American Radical and Reform Writers, Series 2, ed. Hester L. Furey, 2009. 63-78.
• “How the Socialism of W. E. B. Du Bois Still Matters: Black Socialism in The Quest of the Silver Fleece – and Beyond.” With Julie K. Kraft. African American Review 41 (Spring 2007): 67-85.
• “Gilman’s Socialism as Background to Her Works.” In Approaches to Teaching “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and Herland, ed. Denise Knight and Cynthia J. Davis. New York: MLA, 2003.
• "A Rose by Any Other Name: Charlotte Perkins Stetson (Gilman) and the Case for American Reform Socialism." American Quarterly 55.4 (Dec. 2003): 603-34.
• Rendezvous with Death: American Poems of the Great War, ed. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002.
• Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.