I’m Professor of French and Cinema and Media Arts at Vanderbilt University.
My interest in French culture and literature stems from a study abroad experience I had as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania. Tired of classes and school in general, I went on the only study abroad program available to engineers, which happened to be in Compiègne, France. I returned to Penn to finish dual degrees in French (which I loved) and engineering (practical). Having experienced the excitement of living in a different culture, I joined the Peace Corps upon graduation, and the next two years found me in Fiji, teaching math and science and living through a military coup. In the end, I opted for what I loved and decided to go to grad school to learn more. My years in France and Fiji helped me to think about interactions between different ethnic groups and cultures, and cultural interactions between Christians and Muslims in the Middle Ages became the topic of my dissertation and first book, Christian, Saracen, and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Routledge, 2001, rpt. 2013). Building on that line of inquiry, my second book looked at the development of racial consciousness in medieval European literature and the importance of the Middle Ages to modern notions of race— Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages (Florida, 2014). My most recent book, An Introduction to Jean Bodel (Florida, 2024), introduces to a wider public an astonishingly versatile author from Arras in the 12th-13th centuries who struggled with changing societal attitudes toward crusading during his lifetime.
As a former computer programmer, I’m fascinated by computing applications for the humanities. I’m currently working with others to create a series of immersive environments using a video game engine that will allow users to learn medieval languages and cultures in authentic, immersive contexts. A volume that I co-edited with Tison Pugh on using games in the literature classroom, Teaching Games and Game Studies in the Literature Classroom, delves into ways that instructors can leverage games to improve student outcomes.
Over the years I’ve developed expertise in French film, digital humanities, and digital media, and I teach courses in those areas most years.
