Professional Experience

• Professor, Mount Vernon Nazarene University, 2017 - present
• Associate Professor, Mount Vernon Nazarene University, 2014 - 2017
• Adjunct Professor, Contemporary Music Center, 2006 - 2008
• Graduate Teaching Assistant, University of Georgia, 2005-2006
• Honors Program Graduate Teaching Assistant, University of Georgia, 2004-2005

Professional Organizations

• MLA
• Conference of Christianity and Literature
• Sigma Tau Delta

Awards and Recognition

• Award for Excellence in Advising and Retention, 2021-2022
• Award for Excellence in Student Recruitment, 2015-2016
• Faculty Member of the Year, Mount Vernon Nazarene University, 2014-2015
• President's Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2010-2011
• "Professing Literature." CCCU Calvin Summer Seminar, Calvin College, Calvin, Michigan, July 2009.

Published Works & Presentations

• "A Conversation with George Saunders.” in Conversations with George Saunders. Ed. Michael O'Connell (2022). 142-154 (originally published in Image: A Journal of Arts and Religion 88 (2016): 57-68).
• "Invocation as Self-Change: George Saunders's Use of Prayer," Religion and the Arts, Vol. 24, Issue 4 (2020). Click here for an abstract.
• “George Saunders’ 400-Pound Saint: Goodness or Ideology.” Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature. (Winter 2019)
• “To Like the Right Things for the Right Reasons.” Journal of Faith and the Academy 11.2 (Fall 2018)
• “Sincere People Act: George Saunders' Religious Characters.” George Saunders at Loyola University Chicago, hosted by the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage, 2018.
• ““Telling Ghost Stories: A Review of Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders.” The Cresset, Trinity 2017.
• “Toni Morrison's American Cain; Or, Sula Peace and the National Identity.” Toni Morrison Society Session. American Literature Association. Boston, Massachusetts, May 2009.
• “'Restoring the Broken Connections': Conflict Resolved in Wendell Berry's Remembering.” Ed. Ben Robertson. New York: Edwin Mellon Press, 2007. 281-98.
• “Saint Anthony, Lost Things, and Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms.” Key West Hemingway (International Hemingway Society Conference). Key West, Florida, June 2004.
• “Cathcart and the Magazine.” War, Literature and the Arts. Vol. 14 (2002). 78-88. (also selected for inclusion in Gale Research, Twentieth Century Literary Criticism, Vol. 151.)