Recent Teaching and Selected Writings

The Archive: Theory, Form, Practice (2018, 2019, 2022). A seminar for graduate students across disciplines in the humanities that explores the theoretical, critical, and practical methods necessary to negotiate historical archives.
Making Modernism: Literature, Dance, and Visual Culture in Chicago, 1893-1955. A National Endowment for the Humanities Summer 2022 Institute. (Directed previous versions in 2013, 2017, 2019).
Art and Public Culture in Chicago (co-director). A National Endowment for the Humanities Summer 2018 institute.
Making Modernism: Literature and Culture in Twentieth-Century Chicago, 1893-1955. A National Endowment for the Humanities Summer 2017 institute. [PDF]
Chicago Studies and the Archive [PDF]

“Kuh-Kuh: The Woman Who Brought Modern Art to Chicago,” Chicago Reader, November 12, 2021.
“Ruth Page, Katherine Dunham, and ‘La Guiablesse,’” Dancing on the Third Coast: Chicago Dance Histories, ed. Susan Manning and Lizzie Leopold (forthcoming, 2023).
“Flicker of an Eyelid: Isamu Noguchi, Ruth Page, and the Universe of Chicago,” Noguchi Museum, 2021.
“Richard Wright’s Chicago,” Richard Wright in Context, edited Michael Nowlin (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
“Waves of Transformation: Five Women of the Chicago Avant-Garde,” Los Angeles Review of Books, Oct. 10, 2021.
“Covert,” Chicago Reader, April 27, 2020.
“Cad of the Century: Two New Biographies of Ben Hecht,” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 12, 2019.
“Dance as Reclamation” Chicago Reader, March 28, 2019.
On Worrying about Linda,” Avidly (November 30, 2018).
“My L.A. in Four Locations,” Los Angeles Review of Books (November 6, 2018).
Midwest Interludes: Three Vignettes of the Chicago Renaissance, Los Angeles Review of Books, August 22, 2017.
“When Chicago Was the Real Literary Capital of the United States,” LitHub, September 18, 2017
“Little Rooms.” Art in Chicago: From the Fire to Now, eds. Robert Cozzolino and Maggie Taft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).
“Margaret Anderson’s My Thirty Years’ War.” Chicago 101 (Chicago: Caxton Club and the University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2017).
“Chicago Poems: Stormy, Husky, Brawling at 100.” Los Angeles Review of Books (July 10, 2016).
“Seeing Eldzier Cortor.” Chicago Review (May, 2016).
‘Fruitful Envy’: Writers at The Arts Club of Chicago.” The Arts Club at 100: Art and Culture in Chicago, 1916-2016 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press/The Arts Club of Chicago, 2016).
“Across Stark Lines.” Centennial: A History of the Renaissance Society, 1915-2015 (Chicago: The Renaissance Society, 2015).
“Stevens and Auden.” Wallace Stevens Journal (Fall, 2013): 224-230.
“100 Years of Poetry: ‘In the Middle of Major Men.’” Poetry Foundation website (October, 2012)
“Alexander Calder Letter to Rue Shaw.” The Newberry 125: Stories of Our Collection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
“Everyday Life Studies.” Modernism/Modernity (January, 2011): 175-180.
“‘An invincible force meets an immovable object’: Gertrude Stein comes to Chicago.” Modernism/Modernity (April, 2010): 331-361.
“Introduction.” Narration, by Gertrude Stein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010): vii-xii.
“Robert Hass’s Guilt or The Weight of Wallace Stevens.” The American Poetry Review, Volume 36, number 5 (Sept/Oct 2007): 37-45.
“Sex and Sexuality.” A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, Eds. David Bradshaw and Kevin J.H. Dettmar (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006).
“Wallace Stevens’ Commonplace.” The Wallace Stevens Journal 29.1 (Spring 2005): 106-116.
“Virginia Woolf’s ‘cotton wool of daily life.’” Journal of Modern Literature 26.2 (Winter 2003): 42-65.
“Gertrude Stein, William James, and Habit in the Shadow of War.” Twentieth-Century Literature, Volume 49, number 3 (Fall 2003): 328-359.
“Stevens and Auden: Antimythological Meetings.” The Wallace Stevens Journal 27 (Fall 2003): 240-254.