American and English Literature and Culture

Invited Speaker on Walt Whitman, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 2005. Part of the "American Treasures" Exhibition.

David H. Hirsch Memorial Lecturer in American Literature, Brown University, Department of English, 2005.

Interviewed for PBS Television series, "American Originals" (Click for Quicktime Movie Clip), first broadcast on 6 May 2005. The episode was nominated for a New York Emmy Award in 2006.

Invited Speaker, Plenary Session, "Walt Whitman's Philadelphia." Conference on Walt Whitman and Place. Rutgers University, Camden, 2005.

Invited Speaker, "Leaves of Grass and the Cities of Whitman's Memory." Leaves of Grass: 150th Anniversary Conference. University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 2005.

"Walt Whitman in Philadelphia, 1892-1919," Modern Language Association, Philadelphia, 2004.

"Walt Whitman and James Russell Lowell, The Contrast," Modern Language Association, San Diego, 2003.

Organizer and Moderator, "American Literary Environmentalism, A Roundtable Discussion." Hope College Critical Issues Symposium, Holland, Michigan, 2001.

"Walt Whitman, James Russell Lowell, and the Rhetoric of Exclusion," American Literature Association, Baltimore, 1999.

"Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter, and Working-Class Comradeship," The Many Cultures of Walt Whitman Conference, Camden, New Jersey, 1998.

"Editors and the New American Studies," Introduction to and Comments Following a Panel Discussion with Cathy Davidson, William Germano, Lindsay Waters, and Paul Wright. The Young Americanists Conference, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1998.

"Revised Lives: Nineteenth-Century American Autobiography and the Changing Self-Representations of Frederick Douglass, P. T. Barnum, and Walt Whitman," American Civilization Colloquium with Professor William Spengemann, The Charles Warren Center, Harvard University, 1997.

"A Question of 'Character': Nineteenth-Century Images of Edgar Allan Poe," SHARP: The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing, Worcester, 1996.

"Whitmanites, Wildeans, and the Rhetoric of Manliness," American Studies Association, Pittsburgh, 1995.

"Singing the Song of Subordination: Walt Whitman's Lincoln Lectures," American Studies Graduate Student Association, Minneapolis, 1994.

"Virginia Woolf and Modern Physics," Society for Literature and Science, Boston, 1993.

"American Expatriates and Modern Physics," Southern American Studies Association, New Orleans, 1993.

Instructional Technology

"Developing an Online Humanities Core Course at a Residential Liberal-Arts College", Midwest Instructional Technology Center (MITC), 2005.

Academic Labor Issues

Invited Speaker, Negotiating the Academic Labor System," John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University, Durham, 2004.

Organizer, "After Degrees of Shame: Finding Solutions to the Adjunct and Part-Time Employment Crisis." A roundtable discussion featuring Barbara Wolf, Michael Berube, and Gary Zabel. American Studies Association, Washington, D.C., 2001.

"Town Hall Meeting on Employment in American Studies," American Studies Association, Detroit, 2000.

"'Saving American Studies': The Academic Job System, Unionization, and the Public Sphere," American Studies Association, Montreal, 1999.

"'Enjoying Your Apprenticeship?': Student Activism and the Academic Job System in 1968 and 1998," Modern Language Association, San Francisco, 1998. [See New York Times coverage.]

"A View from the Bottom: Changing the Academic Labor System," American Studies Association, Seattle, 1998.