Serving

I am on the Executive Committee of the Association of Departments of English of the Modern Language Association. I have participated in the ADE Summer Seminars for years, including speaking in 2024 as part of the featured plenary, “Academic Program and Program Leadership,” delivering a 2022 plenary lecture, “Toward a More Humane Humanities,” in conversation with Paula M. Krebs, Executive Director, MLA, and co-moderating a number of full-day pre-seminar workshops over the years, including three directors of graduate study workshops and two workshops for chairs and directors of undergraduate studies. I have also organized an ADE-sponsored roundtable, “Saving Literary History,” for the 2025 MLA convention.

I was a member and 2019-20 Chair of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Professional Rights and Responsibilities (2017-20), for whom I organized a roundtable at the 2019 annual convention, “The Uses and Misuses of Academic Freedom” and one at the 2021 convention, “There’s No Such Thing as a Free Library: Access to Research Resources and Academic Freedom.” I have also served as the Twentieth- and Twenty-first-Century American Language, Literature, and Culture Forum representative to MLA’s Delegate Assembly (2017-20). I served from 2014-2017 on the Advisory Committee of PMLA.

I have been Associate Chair of the Department of English at the University of Missouri since 2023 and was previously Director of Undergraduate Studies from 2017 to 2019, during which time I spent some time sharing pictures of things, Director of Graduate Studies for the department from 2010 to 2014, and Faculty Fellow in the Graduate School 2015 to 2016.

I am currently serving on the Executive Committee of the recently revived University of Missouri chapter of the American Association of University Professors. AAUP at Mizzou is dedicated to advancing academic freedom and shared governance; promoting professional and economic security for faculty; and supporting an informed, inclusive, and engaged faculty community.

Mizzou has a new minor in Missouri Studies, coming into existence at the same time as the new Center for Missouri Studies is being completed. I’m directing it, which means working with people across campus to find and create courses that students can take to earn the minor. I’ve developed a course on Missouri writers; my efforts to learn more about the state I’ve come to call home include giving a paper at a conference on the 200th anniversary of the Missouri Crisis, hosted by The Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, and giving talks through the joint Missouri Humanities Council/State Historical Society of Missouri Speakers Bureau program.