"Who is Vulnerable?" This project investigates how the concept of vulnerability—frequently dismissed or maligned in dominant U.S. cultural narratives—offers a vital lens for rethinking American identity, history, and power. My research interrogates how national narratives and myths of autonomy, self-reliance, and rugged individualism have shaped literary and cultural discourse, often in ways that marginalize or pathologize dependency and emotional expression, especially in relation to gender. I argue that alongside these dominant narratives, American literature offers a counter-archive—one in which vulnerability is not only acknowledged but becomes a generative force, especially in depictions of masculinity. At a moment of democratic fragility, the rise of authoritarianism, and widespread anxieties about bodily and intellectual autonomy, vulnerability has reemerged as a contested and consequential concept; it has become a tool of critical solidarity and a weapon of reactionary politics. This project asks how literature, as both cultural artifact and imaginative practice, can help us rethink vulnerability not as weakness or as peril, but as a democratic and relational ethic—one that challenges the exclusions built into traditional accounts of American selfhood and that opens space for more inclusive and responsive narratives of belonging and care. 

Other ongoing projects include:

“Stairway to Heaven: One Family’s Journey in the Eldercare Business in America”: An autoethnographic study that follows a family eldercare business from before the advent of Medicare through the Covid pandemic.

 “American Grifters, Urban Tricksters, and the Making of Donald J. Trump”: A study of American con men and the archetypes and narratives that paved the way for our current climate in which con men are elevated to the highest positions of political power in the United States.

“Collecting Disaster” is an examination of archival collections dedicated to the industry of risk management that reframes the actuarial representation of risk to the realms of humanities scholarship, uncovering new political and cultural implications in rare and under-examined visual and material artifacts.  This is a collaboration with art historian and curator, Dr. Susan Rosenberg.