“All the Feels: Failure, Affect, and Unlearning Close Reading”
Pedagogy (2023) 23 (3): 519-528
Must we avoid the subjective and the personal when we stick to the text as close readers? By examining a moment of affective disruption in an advanced seminar, this autoethnographic account suggests that students should engage with their feelings as they develop meaningful readings of cultural texts.
Interviewed for the Wesleyan Magazine, 2023 Summer Issue, “Ghost in the Machine”
By using artificial intelligence to generate text that sounds like human-authored prose, ChatGPT signals a fraught new era for the written word. But instead of doomsaying over the potential for plagiarism in higher ed, Wesleyan faculty, staff, and students are working toward a better understanding of writing in the age of robots.
“I Saw the Shame on His Face”: Emotion, Genre, and Political Practice in the Work of Jose Antonio Vargas
Genre (2018) 51 (2): 159-181.
This article examines the public essays of the immigrant activist Jose Antonio Vargas. It situates his 2011 New York Times Magazine essay “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant” and his 2012 Time magazine essay “Not Legal, Not Leaving” in the larger historical context of the undocumented youth movement in the United States. More specifically, this article identifies how the national comprehensive immigration reform movement created a political genre known as the Dreamer narrative that undocumented youth were trained to produce. By examining the ways Vargas performs these genre expectations, with a particular interest in revising their affective dimensions, the article exposes Vargas’s approach to political engagement, one that derives from the emotional work undocumented migrants undertake to narrate themselves into hostile and vitriolic discourses of belonging.