Directory Profile

Awards, Distinctions, and Honors

• 2022-2023 Horace T. Morse Award for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education
• Distinguished University Teaching Professor
• Member of University of Minnesota Academy of Distinguished Teachers
• 2022 Distinguished Teaching Award
• 2022 Outstanding Educator Award
• 2014 Outstanding Service Learning Faculty Award

Research Interests

• Composition & Rhetoric
• American Literature
• Popular Culture
• Creative Writing

Selected Publications

• With Mark E. Huglen. Iconic Sports Venues: Persuasion in Public Spaces. New York: Peter Lang, January 2017. Print.
• “A Scientific Method to Muppet Madness: The Enduring Significance of Innovation at Muppet Labs.” The Scientist in Popular Culture: Playing God and Working Wonders.  Ed. Rebecca Janicker.  Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022. 113-131. Print.
• “A Mass Grave and a Massacre: Remembrances of Death at Wounded Knee, South Dakota.” Dark Tourism and Pilgrimage.  Ed. Daniel Olsen and Maximiliano Korstanje.  Boston, MA: CABI, 2020.  197-204. Print.  
• “Playing at Home: The Huron Arena as Domestic Space.”  In Johannesen and Huglen, eds. Iconic Sports Venues: Persuasion in Public Spaces.  New York: Peter Lang, 2017. 125-140. Print.
• “Mick Foley’s Mankind and the Performance of Mental Illness in Professional Wrestling.” Survive & Thrive: A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine 8.2 (2022): Article 4. https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/survive_thrive/vol8/iss2/4. Peer-reviewed scholarly article.
• “Depictions of American Indians in George Armstrong Custer’s My Life on the Plains.” Humanities 8.1 (2019): 56, https://doi.org/10.3390/h8010056.  Web and Print.  Peer-reviewed scholarly article. “No Place Like Home: Magical Ruralism as Cultural Discourse.”  Penumbra: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Critical and Creative Inquiry 5 (Summer 2018): 126-140.  Print.  Peer-reviewed scholarly article.
• “What to Make of It? Detritus, Wreckage, and Imaginative Re-Purposing in Moby-Dick.” The Nautilus: A Maritime Journal of Literature, History, and Culture 7 (2016): 7-26. Print. Peer-reviewed scholarly article.  
• "Intro to Creative Writing." Nonfiction Essay. The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction. Ed. Dinty W. Moore and Zoë Bossiere.  Brookline Brookline, MA: Rose Metal Press, 2020. p. 64-66.
• “Ronnie.” Short fiction. Oakwood (2018): 85-86. Print.
• “Centennial.” Fiction. South Dakota Review 50.1 (2013): 179-87. Print.

Local Community Memberships/Involvement

• Crookston Community Theatre, 2023 Ox Cart Days Vice Chair

Educational Background

• Ph.D. in English from the University of South Dakota, 2012