I am a scholar of contemporary American literature and cultural history and what I focus on in my thinking work is how to conceptualize place and space. I pay attention to the politics of literature and culture using various frameworks of feminist studies. I write scholarship for professors and specialists as well as public-oriented work designed for broad audiences who care about research dedicated to social action.
I have written a couple of books, lots of essays, and edited two issues of the journal Western American Literature. Click here to see more detail on writing and teaching on the Rice University faculty pages.
I am taking the lead on this project Living West as Feminists: Conversations about the Where of Us, but I don’t see the project as “mine.” The interviews we tape are shared with participants, and blog posts are done in consultation. Like the other collaborative project I am involved in, The Institute for Women Surfers, the project belongs to us all, it’s an effort at building relations that can support our writing, art, politics, and what we call here “feminist rest stops.” These sites of relief or pausing might be psychological, or places that are real, or combinations. But the aim is finding security along the way of practicing politically engaged scholarly lives.
We are travelling over a couple of summers to visit with folks and have conversations about how each of us lives our feminisms, defines our feminisms, and practices our relations to places and land. Each participant has chosen a place of significance. In those places, we sit down for a time; we talk. It turns out that we’ve been eating a lot of dinners and lunches and having various local treats, and hanging out in campgrounds, family lands, around kitchen tables, in libraries, favorite gardens, offices, and having picnics in backyards. We are meeting elder and young dogs, one cat, younger children, teenage children, adult children, and scholars’ partners, parents, and sheep. Through these webs of relations, we are taking up the terms and problems of “feminism,” “whiteness,” and “the West.” We are talking a lot about early life pushes toward feminist behavior, whatever they were, and how often we’ve forgotten the early pushes, how much they get left behind for the new-improved forms of ourselves (supposedly) that develop with more education. Often our conversations have strayed into personal histories we don’t get a chance to talk about – and these surprises have given new energy to thinking about the “I.”
So far . . . it’s been interesting and . . . encouraging! Many of us teaching in universities find the present moment disheartening for humanities departments and research. Three decades of defunding higher education in the U.S. has taken a toll as research support and public authority gets directed toward STEM and professional fields. COVID multiplied difficulties. But our time together and ways of listening to one another seems to produce hopefulness, connections, unexpected insights, and places of well-being along the many curves and crossings of our life paths.