I graduated from Texas Tech University in August, 2015, with  a Ph.D. in Literature. While at Tech I participated in the Literature, Social Justice, and Environment (LSJE) initiative in the Department of English.

My area of scholarship is 19^th through 21^st century American literature, film, and television. I am particularly interested in issues of race, gender, and place/environment. My current project builds on my dissertation to explore the cultural myths, tropes, and spaces deployed in the figuration of the American frontier and the US/Mexico borderlands. While my dissertation examined the wild popularity of monster narratives in our present cultural moment, my current project more specifically investigates both how monster narratives are deployed in the ongoing Othering of the non-Anglo American and how minority authors subvert the figure of the monster to reconfigure American identities and spaces in a postcolonial, postmodern moment.