I grew up in Southern California during the 60s and 70s and went to the University of Southern California as an undergrad. I graduated with a degree in English in 1981. I went to grad school at the University of California, Los Angeles in the 80s and got my PhD in American Literature in 1989. I taught at UCLA Writing Programs for two years and came to the Department of English (formerly the Department of Literature and Language) at Northern Kentucky University in 1991.

I’ve published in the fields of American literature, Composition and Rhetoric, Cinema Studies, and Pop Culture. I’ve edited an essay collection about teaching multicultural American literature called The Canon in the Classroom: Pedagogical Implications of Canon Revision in American Literature (Garland 1995), and I’ve been the editor of the Instructor’s Guide for the Heath Anthology of American Literature since the second edition.

I’m also the editor of a collection on politics and The Simpsons: Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture (Wayne State UP 2004). I’ve written two composition textbooks: The Working Life: Readings on Work, Labor, and Career (Longman 2003) and Text Messaging: Reading and Writing about Popular Culture (Cengage 2008).

Currently, my main area of focus is cinema studies. My monograph, Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy: Gender as Genre, came in 2013 from Routledge. My textbook on the history of American movies, Screen Ages: A Survey of American Cinema was published in 2015 by Routledge, and my book on the feminist noir crime show The Killing came out in 2017 from Wayne State University Press. My latest essay collection, co-edited   with my friend Andy Miller, Transforming Harry: The Adaptation of Harry Potter in the Transmedia Age, is just out from Wayne State.