Directory

Faculty Research

• 19th- and 20th-century American literature
• Road culture and tourism theory
• Mark Twain
• American humor and satire

Books

• Mark Twain, Travel Books, and Tourism: The Tide of a Great Popular Movement. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002, rpt. 2009.

Edited Books

• Mark Twain on the Move: A Travel Reader. Co-edited with Alan Gribben. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009.

Articles

• “When the Candle Goes Out: The Complexity of Simple Jokes and the Limits of Satire.” Studies in American Humor 4.2 (2018): 152-59.
• “Romancing the American Dream: The Coen Brothers’ Raising Arizona.” Studies in American Humor 3.1 (2017): 1-21.
• “’Immediate Consciousness’ and the American Open Road: Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” Studies in Travel Writing 17.4 (2013): 398-410.
• “Mark Twain and the Middle Landscape in Paint and Print.” Mark Twain Journal 48.1-2 (2010 [2013]): 14-28.
• “Keeping the Faith in Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad.” South Atlantic Review 64.2 (1999): 58-80.
• “The Tourist as Art Critic: Mark Twain and the Old Masters.” Studies in American Culture 22.2 (1999): 61-69.
• “The Trouble with Tourists: Authenticity and the Failure of Tourism.” Popular Culture Review 10.2 (1999): 9-19.
• “Touring Decay: Nineteenth-Century American Travel Writers in Europe.” Papers on Language and Literature 35.2 (1999): 206-22.

Book Chapters

• “Travel Writing.” Mark Twain in Context. Edited by John Bird. New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in 2019.
• “Tourism and Landscape in The Awakening.” Critical Insights: The Awakening by Kate Chopin. Edited by Robert C. Evans. Ipswich, MA: Salem Press/Grey House Publishing, 2014. 162-75.
• “The Subversion of Happy Endings in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.” The Cinema of Terry Gilliam: It’s a Mad World . Edited by Jeff Birkenstein, Anna Froula, and Karen Randell. New York: Wallflower Press/Columbia UP, 2013. 66-78. –co-written with Eric Sterling.
• “Seeing the River: Mark Twain’s Landscape Imagination.” Mark Twain’s Geographical Imagination. Ed. Joseph A. Alvarez. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. 101-15.
• “Mark Twain and Travel Writing.” A Companion to Mark Twain. Ed. Louis Budd and Peter Messent. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 338-53.