My primary research and teaching areas include Native writing from the late eighteenth century to the present, Indigenous critical theory, and nation/nationalism and soveriegnty/self-determination studies. More broadly, I am interested in the politics of race, nation, citizenship, and belonging in ethnic American writing and the relationships between narrative form, cultural representation, public policy, and the law.

My current book project, Stoking the Fire: Nationhood in Century Cherokee Writing, 1907-1970 (University of Oklahoma Press, Spring 2018), examines how four Cherokee writers variously remembered, imagined and enacted Cherokee nationhood in the period between Oklahoma statehood in 1907 and tribal reorganization in the early 1970s. Often read as an intellectually inactive and politically insignificant "dark age" in Cherokee history, I recover this period as a rich archive of Cherokee national memory capable of informing contemporary discussions about soveriegnty, self-determination, citizenship and belonging in Cherokee Country and Native American and Indigenous Studies today. 

Books 

• Stoking the Fire: Nationhood in Cherokee Writing, 1907-1970. University of Oklahoma Press. Forthcoming, Spring 2018. 

Articles and Book Chapters

• “Sovereignty.” Journal of Western American Literature. Special Issue: On the Occasion of the 50^th Anniversary. Vol. 53, No. 1 (May 2018).
• “American Indian Modernities and the New Modernist Studies’ ‘Indian Problem.’” Texas Studies in Language and Literature. Vol. 59, No. 3 (Fall 2017). 
• “Identity, Culture, Community, and Nation: Native Literary Theory as Politics and Praxis.” Routledge Companion to Native American Literature. Ed. Deborah Lea Madsen. New York and Oxford: Routledge P. Forthcoming 2015. 
• "Citizenship, Land and Law: Constitutional Criticism and John Milton Oskison's Black Jack Davy." Studies in American Indian Literatures. 23.4 (Winter 2012): 77-115.
• "'Since I was given a name by the kind fathers, I take more pride in myself': Historical Recovery, Colonial Mimicry and Thoughts on Disappearing Indians in Elena Zamora O'Shea's El Mesquite." Nakum Journal 1.1 (Winter 2010): 11-37. 
• "Indigenous Communities, Indigenous Nations: Interrogating Contemporary Indigenous Intellectualisms." Sovereignty, Separatism and Survival: Ideological Enounters in the Literature of Native North America. Ed. Benjamin D. Carson. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars P, 2009. 82-109. 

Book Reviews

• Audra Simpson. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 39.2 (2015): 148-50.
• James W. Parins, Literacy and Intellectual Life in the Cherokee Nation, 1820-1906. Studies in American Indian Literatures 27.1 (Spring 2015). 112-16.  
• Nelson, Joshua B., Progressive Traditions: Identity in Cherokee Literature and Culture. Transmotion Journal (2015): 94-99.
• Sing: Poetry of the Indigenous Americas ed. by Allison Adelle Hedgecoke. American Indian Quarterly 36.4 (Winter/Spring 2013): 258-61.
• X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent by Scott Lyons. e3w Review of Books 11 (Spring 2011): 7-8. 
• Lost Creeks: Collected Journals of Alexander Posey ed Matthew Wynn Sivilis. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 34.4 (2010): 127-29.
• Cherokee Thoughts: Honest and Uncensored by Robert J. Conley. Great Plains Quarterly 30.1 (Winter 2010): 69-70. 
• Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture by Shari M. Huhndorf. e3w Review of Books 10 (Spring 2010): 7-8.
• Before the Country: Native Renaissance, Canadian Mythology by Stephanie McKenzie. Studies in American Indian Literatures 21.1 (Spring 2009): 87-90.  

• ENG 244: Introduction to Native American Literatures
• ENG 245: Introduction to Ethnic American Literatures
• ENG 365: Race, Nation, and Modernist Form in the Ethnic American Bildungsroman
• ENG 361: Native American Writers (Novel)
• ENG 361: Native American Writers (Nationhood, Sovereignty, Story, and Place)
• ENG 488/588: Native American Literature and Film (Race and Film)
• ENG 660: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Belonging in the Ethnic American Bildungsroman
• ENG 660: Native American Writing from Allotment to the Renaissance, 1887-1968