Bangor University

Faculty Member, English

Professor of English

About

My most recent research projects have focussed on the gothic. My first published work in this area was _Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic_, which examined how writers of the period gothicized biracial and passing figures in order to frame them within the rubric of a demonization of difference. In _Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature_, I continued to delve into the frigid, dark waters of gothicism by looking at how collective stories about national identity and belonging tend to be haunted by a fear that a shared narrative might be nothing more than an elaborate artifice. Currently, I am working on a book that examines the relationship between the gothic and the law in the early U.S. republic.

My interest in postcolonial studies has grown out of my work on travel writing. My monograph _Exotic Journeys: Exploring the Erotics of U.S. Travel Literature_ examined the place of travel writing in the rhetoric of imperial expansion and colonial ideology. This book led to a collaborative work in which I helped to compile an anthology of Asian and African travel literature, _Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing_, which introduces contemporary readers to travel literature from the world beyond Europe. I recently completed _Postcolonial Literature_.

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