Biography

I joined the Department of English at Western Oregon University in fall 1999. Since 2008 I have also served as the director of WOU’s Honors Program.  Founded in 1856, Western Oregon University is a public liberal arts college with an enrollment of approximately 2750 undergraduate students.

As honors program director, I oversee all student recruitment and retention initiatives and coordinate
the interdisciplinary honors curriculum, among other duties.  The program comprises the top three
percent of WOU’s undergraduate population.

As literature professor, I specialize in twentieth-century English and Irish literature, especially fiction of
the post-World War II period. I also teach classes in broader literary history, critical theory, and film.

My scholarly projects are oriented to both general and specialized audiences.  Major projects include a book, Father and Son: Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, and the British Novel Since 1950 (University of Wisconsin, 2003 & 2005) as well as an edited collection, Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 

My most recent major project is The Cambridge Companion to Martin Amis, due to be published in summer 2026.  This edited collection features the work of fourteen scholars from five different countries and will provide a definitive survey of Amis’s fifty-year career.

Until 2022, I also oversaw the Martin Amis Web, the authoritative digital archive for that author.  In 2012,
it was archived by the British Library as a site of scholarly importance but in 2022 was permanently damaged by a server upgrade.

An 80,000 word novel, Flight, remains unpublished but was perhaps my most meaningful endeavor.  I have also begun writing my final scholarly project, on Irish traumatic spaces.

Select Grants and Awards

• Faculty Advisor of the Year, NACADA (national award, 2016), and Western Oregon University
  (campus award, 2014)
• Invited Fellow, Institute for Study Abroad Ireland, 2015.  Ireland and Northern Ireland locations:  
  Dublin, Meath, Donegal, Fermanagh, Ballyshannon, Sligo, Leitrim, Derry City, Bundoran
• Invited Fellow, Canadian Studies Institute, 2009. Alberta Province locations: Calgary, Banff Centre, Athabasca Glacier, Ice Fields Parkway, Edmonton, Fort McMurray Oil Sands, DrumHeller, Lethbridge
• Mario & Alma Pastega Award for Excellence in Scholarship, Western Oregon University, 2007
• Travel Research Grants:  Dublin, Cork, and Galway, Ireland  |  Belfast, Northern Ireland  |  London, England  |  Huntington Library, California  |  Thomas Merton Center and the Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky