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books

• The Cultural Return (FlashPoints). University of California Press, 2012. pdf
• The Encyclopedia of the Novel (Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature). General editor, Peter Melville Logan; assoc. eds. Olakunle George, Susan Hegeman, and Efraín Kristal, (Wiley-Blackwell 2011).
• Patterns for America. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. E-book edition, 2001. A Choice outstanding academic book for 1999.

selected essays

• “American Popular Social Science: the Boasian Legacy” Amerikastudien / American Studies, Fall 2018.
• (co-author, with Paul Ortiz) “Nazis on Campus: A Union and Community Responds” Thought and Action, Spring, 2018.
• “Oppenheimer’s House; or, the Contradictions of Academic Life from the Cold War to Neoliberalism” Journal of Academic Freedom Vol. 8, 2017.
•  “A Sociological Imagination,” special issue of Studia Neophilologica, ed. David Watson and Danuta Fjellestad, 87:1, 1-7, 2015.
• “The Novel and the Rise of Social Science,” ch. 25 in The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Vol. 6: The American Novel 1870-1940, Ed. Priscilla Wald and Michael A. Elliott. Oxford, 2014; 405-22.
• “A ‘Wordminded’ People Encounters the Armory Show,” ch. in The Armory Show at 100: Modernism and Revolution, ed. Kimberly Orcutt and Marilyn Kushner, New York Historical Society, 2013; 155-168.
• “The American Modernists,” ch. in A Companion to 20th Century American Fiction, ed. David Seed. Blackwell, 2010; 11-23.
• “Culture, Patriotism, and the Habitus of a Discipline; or, What Happens to American Studies in a Moment of Globalization?” Genre 38, 2005.
• “Naïve Modernism and the Politics of Embarrassment” in Discipline and Practice: The (Ir)resistibility of Theory Eds. Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus. Bucknell, 2004; 154-177.
• “The ‘Culture’ of American Studies” REAL (Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature) 19, 2003; 47-63.
• “Histories of the Other,” review essay, American Literary History 15.3 (Fall 2003), 625-38.
• “Haunted by Mass Culture,” review essay, American Literary History 12.1-2 (Winter 2000), 298-317.
• “Franz Boas and Professional Anthropology: On Mapping the Borders of the ‘Modern’,” Victorian Studies special issue on “Victorian Ethnography.” 41.3 (Spring 1998), 455-83.
• “Imagining Totality: Rhetorics of and versus ‘Culture’,” Common Knowledge 6.3 (Winter 1997), 51-72.
• “Taking Blondes Seriously,” American Literary History 7.3 (Fall 1995), 525-554.
• “Landscapes, Indians, and Photography in the Age of Scientific Exploration,” in The Big Empty: Essays on the Land as Narrative, ed. Leonard Engel, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994.
• “Shopping for Identities: ‘A Nation of Nations’ and the Weak Ethnicity of Objects,” Public Culture 3.2 (Spring 1991), 71-92.
• “Speaking From the Margins,” (compares debates in current feminist theory and African philosophy), SAPINA Newsletter (Bulletin of the Society for African Philosophy in North America) 2.2-3 (May-December 1990), 67-80.
• “Native American ‘Texts’ and the Problem of Authenticity,” American Quarterly 41.2 (June 1989), 265-283.
• “History, Ethnography, Myth: Some Notes on the ‘Indian-Centered’ Narrative,” Social Text 23 (Fall/Winter 1989), 144-160.

selected talks

• “21^stCentury Criticism and the Problem of Class,” Conference speaker, “Reading in the Age of Trump: The Politics and Possibility of Literary Studies Now,” Obama Institute for American Studies, Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany, May 17, 2019
• “The ‘Soft Power’ of Humanities Centers,” Plenary panelist, Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers (ALSCW) Vanderbilt University, November 3, 2018
• “Organizing Beyond Bargaining: Some Examples from United Faculty of Florida” University of Washington Faculty Forward, University of Washington, Seattle, November 17, 2017
• “Terra Ultima: Arctic Indigeneity and the Global Imagination,” keynote, fourth annual Global Studies Symposium, “Global Studies for China and the World,” October 22, Shantou University, Guangdong Province, PRC
• “We Have Always Been Critical; or, the Humanities Inside and Out” IU Cultural Studies Conference, “Engagements, Events, Energies: The Humanities Between Affirmation and Critique” April 18, Indiana University, Bloomington
• Panelist on “Theory and Culture,” Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities 25th Anniversary Celebration, Vanderbilt University, September 20.
• “The Anthropolical Turn,” May 17, “Futures of the Present” conference, Uppsala University, Uppsala Sweden, 2013
• Panel discussant, “’Clothed in Immense Power’: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Obama Era,” April 9, Uppsala University, 2013
• “Casinos, Slow Food, and the Occupy Movement: Indigenous People and the Global Imagination” January 30, 2013 Fulbright Lecture, Uppsala University, Uppsala Sweden; May 30, 2013 Linnaeus University, Växjö Sweden
• “Voting and Voter Suppression: Postcards from Florida” November 6, 2012, Department of Political Science, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
• “‘What is Human about Humans?’: MACOS and the Cold War Culture Wars,” plenary lecture, Scandinavian Association for American Studies, September 20, 2012 Uppsala, Sweden
• Roundtable participant, “Science, Scientism, & Anti-Science in the Humanities: A Symposium in Honor of Barbara Herrnstein Smith,” February 11, 2011, Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University
• “Culture and Politics; or, A Little Ground Clearing in Defense of a Concept,” April 8, 2010, Northwestern University Department of French and Italian
• “Cultural Discontents,” September 12, 2006, Cultural Anthropology Seminar Series and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, University of Illinois
• Colloquium participant, “Theory After 9/11: Has Anything Changed?” September 11, 2006, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, University of Illinois
• “A Brief History of the Cultural Turn,” May 6, 2006, “Histories of the Human Sciences: Different Disciplinary Perspectives” Conference, Department of the History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania
• “Anti-Culture/Anti-Globalization,” April 16-17, 2004, “Anticipated Utopias: The Ethics and Politics of Collectivity” conference, Institute for Critical Theory, Duke University. Also presented position paper on Alain Badiou’s Ethics and participated in a roundtable on Agnes Heller’s “The Frankfurt School”
• “Culture/Globalization,” February 17, 2004, Ropes Lecture Series, University of Cincinnati
• “Mysteries of the City: Conspiracy, Melodrama, and Traffic in Souls” Cities of Women conference, December 4, 2003, University of Florida
• “Naïve Modernism and the Politics of Embarrassment,” March 11, 2003, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
• “The ‘Culture’ of American Studies,” “Theories of American Culture” conference, May 9-11, 2002, John F. Kennedy Institute, Freie Universität, Berlin

updated 8/20/2019