I first discovered my vocation as a teacher by serving as a TA in the Christ College Freshman Program, where I developed valuable pedagogical skills I carry with me to this day. Although I was already considering a career in teaching, working with a cohort of likeminded instructors every Thursday night to prepare to share our knowledge with a small group of freshmen that Monday proved to me to be the ideal classroom scenario. After graduating from Christ College, my teaching career at the University of Iowa continues to draw on what I learned in my experience at Valparaiso University. In my classroom, I foreground discussion as a method of drawing meaning from a text. My students learn that the fundamental skills of interpretation rely on
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My dissertation, entitled “Comic Book Realism: Sincerity, Ethics, and the Superhero in Contemporary American Literature,” has developed out of questions I began asking at Christ College, beginning with “Word and Image,” when Professor David Morgan introduced me to the study of comics in Fall 2007. The relationship between word and image is at the heart of my dissertation, in which I examine the emerging genre of what I am calling “comic book realism,” novels which draw on, reference, and obliquely participate in the superhero genre by crafting stories about comic book readers who themselves become or imagine themselves to be superheroes. In particular, I argue that comic book realism allows writers to confront questions of identity by using the metaphor of the superhero/alter ego dynamic. Furthermore, the superhero’s quest for justice helps to wrestle with questions of ethical obligation in an increasingly interconnected world. Beyond the present moment, comic book realism frequently grapples with an ethical response to historical atrocities, particularly the Holocaust. At its heart, this project examines the transhistorical significance of the superhero genre since 1938, the quasi-religious reverence we have for superheroes, and the value of the human imagination in
My dissertation, entitled “Comic Book Realism: Sincerity, Ethics, and the Superhero in Contemporary American Literature,” has developed out of questions I began asking at Christ College, beginning with “Word and Image,” when Professor David Morgan introduced me to the study of comics in Fall 2007. The relationship between word and image is at the heart of my dissertation, in which I examine the emerging genre of what I am calling “comic book realism,” novels which draw on, reference, and obliquely participate in the superhero genre by crafting stories about comic book readers who themselves become or imagine themselves to be superheroes. In particular, I argue that comic book realism allows writers to confront questions of identity by using the metaphor of the superhero/alter ego dynamic. Furthermore, the superhero’s quest for justice helps to wrestle with questions of ethical obligation in an increasingly interconnected world. Beyond the present moment, comic book realism frequently grapples with an ethical response to historical atrocities, particularly the Holocaust. At its heart, this project examines the transhistorical significance of the superhero genre since 1938, the quasi-religious reverence we have for superheroes, and the value of the human imagination in