Writing

BOOKS

BECOMING CAJUN, BECOMING AMERICAN: THE ACADIAN IN AMERICAN LITERATURE FROM LONGFELLOW TO JAMES LEE BURKE (LSU Press, 2009)

This study explores the literary representations of the Acadians in national literature from their 1755 expulsion from Acadia (present day Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island) and consequent settlement in the Louisiana colony, to their assimilation to mainstream American life in the twentieth century. Including works by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, George Washington Cable, Kate Chopin, Ernest Gaines, James Lee Burke, and Tim Gautreaux, this book celebrates the survival of a people while investigating the evolution of the Cajun in myth and popular culture. Buy Here

IMAGES OF DEPRESSION-ERA LOUISIANA: THE FSA PHOTOGRAPHS OF BEN SHAHN, RUSSELL LEE, AND MARION POST WOLCOTT (LSU Press, 2017)

Co-authored with Bryan Giemza, this collection of Depression-era photos, accompanied by a brief history of the FSA and Louisiana, reveals the larger story of the FSA photographers’ journeys through the state and the people they met along the way. Buy Here

ARTICLES

  • “Wearing Down the Fence: Disrupting the Black-White Binary in Ernest J. Gaines’s Of Love and Dust.” Forthcoming from Mississippi Quarterly.
  • “Beyond the Weeds: Teaching the Significance of Cajuns in A Gathering of Old Men.” Approaches to Teaching Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Other Works, edited by John Wharton Lowe and Herman Beavers, Modern Language Association of America, 2019, pp. 155-63.
  • “Disney’s Cajun Firefly: Shedding Light on Disney and Americanization.” The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 47, no. 5, 2014, pp. 968-77.
  • “Reel Horror: Louisiana’s Vanishing Wetlands and the Threat of Hollywood (Mis)Representation.” Southerners on Film: Essays on Hollywood Portrayals Since the 1970s. Edited by Andrew Leiter, McFarland, 2011, pp. 187-203.
  • “Surviving the Storm: Detecting Crime in Katrina Fiction.” Clues: A Journal of Detection, vol. 29, no. 1, Spring 2011, pp. 102-12.
  • “Longfellow’s Evangeline: The Origins of American Myth and Cajun Memory,” chapter one of Becoming Cajun, Becoming American: The Acadian in American Literature from Longfellow to James Lee Burke, published in Nineteenth Century Literature Criticism, vol. 235.
  • “A Breed Between: Racial Mediation in the Fiction of Ernest Gaines.” MELUS, vol. 31, no. 2, Summer 2006, pp. 95-118.
  • “Between Men: Homosocial Desire in Walker Percy’s Lancelot.” Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 1, 2002-2003, pp. 125-45.

INTERVIEWS

  • “An Interview with Tim Gautreaux.” Conversations with Tim Gautreaux. Edited by L. Lamar Nisly, UP of Mississippi, 2012, pp. 110-19.
  • Interview with Tim Gautreaux. Carolina Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 2, 2005, pp. 66-76.

OTHER WRITING

  • Writer for “Under the Walnut Tree,” the award-winning, stop-motion, animated short film by Leah Bedrosian Peterson inspired by the Armenian Massacres, the precursor to the Armenian Genocide.