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Book Chapters

“Black Dancers Matter: Black Ballerinas, Robert E. Lee and the Politics of Resistance” with Amanda Millis in Art, Activism, and Contemporary Political Theory edited by Alex Zamalin and Alix Olsen (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, forthcoming).

“Is a Dream a Lie? Hope, Cruel Optimism, and Bruce Springsteen’s Working Class” in This Hard Land: Scenes from the American Working Class edited by Steven Michaels (Lexington, KY: Lexington Books, forthcoming).

Veep, Tragicomedy, and the Perpetual Crisis of the American Republic” in Television Sitcom and Cultural Crisis edited by Holly Holladay and Chandler Classen (New York: Routledge, 2024).

“Portrait of the Artist as a Grapefruit: Yoko Ono, Japanese Mourning, and American Pop” in Powers of Pop: Cross-Cultural Influences Between Japanese and American Pop Cultures edited by Matthew Hodge and Kendra Sheehan (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023), 234-259. Read.

“Aristophanes in Spurs: Blazing Saddles, Attic Comedy, HBO, and the Politics of Democratic Laughter,” in A Fistful of Politics. The Western and Political Thought edited by Damien Picariello (London: Palgrave McMillan, 2023), 155-172. Read.

“To Condense a Mockingbird: Harper Lee, the Reader’s Digest, and the Cold War,” with Kristen Popham in Red Reckoning: A New History of the Cold War and the Transformation of American Life edited by Mark Boulton and Tobias Gibson, (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 2023), 248-266. Read.

Black in a White World: The Watts Prophets and the Promise of Democratic Futurity,” in Black Popular Culture and Social Justice: Beyond the Culture edited by Lakeyta Bonnette-Bailey and Jonathan Gayles, (New York: Routledge, 2023), 142-155. Read.

“The Value of Uncertainty in Uncertain Times (Or, ‘Pay Attention You Assholes!’): Donald Trump, David Simon, and The Plot Against America,” in American Television During a Television Presidency edited by Karen McNally (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2022), 97-115. Read.

“‘About 136′: Bob Dylan’s Democratic Irony’ in Isn’t It Ironic? Irony in Contemporary Popular Culture edited by Ian Kinane and Elizabeth Parker (London: Routledge, 2021), 62-79. Read.

“Music, Mourning, and Democratic Resilience: Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising,” in The Democratic Arts of Mourning; Political Theory and Loss edited by Alexander Hirsch and David McIvor (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 167-185. Read.

“The Politics and Literature of Unknowingness: Philip Roth’s Our Gang and The Plot Against America” in A Political Companion to Philip Roth edited by Lee Trepanier and Claudia-Franziska Bruehwiler (Lexington, KY: The University of Press of Kentucky, 2017), 64-94. Read. Reprinted in vogelinview May 2, 2018. Read.

“The Dangerous Ambivalence of John Steinbeck” in A Political Companion to John Steinbeck edited by Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh and Simon Stow (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2013), 8-16.  Read.

“‘Can You Honestly Love a Dishonest Thing?’: The Tragic Patriotism of The Winter of Our Discontent” in A Political Companion to John Steinbeck edited by Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh and Simon Stow (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2013), 325-348.  Read.

“‘To Him Other Countries Arrive as Contributions’: Richard Rorty, European Theory, and the Poetry of American Politics,” Pragmatismus und Hermeneutik: Beitrage zu Richard Rortys Kulturpolitik eds. Matthias Buschmeier and Espen Hammer (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2011), 108-125.  Read.

“Frederick Douglass,” SAGE Encyclopedia of Political Theory edited by Mark Bevir (Sage, 2010). Read.

“Portraits 9/11/01: The New York Times and the Pornography of Grief” in Literature After 9/11 edited by Jeanne Follansbee Quinn and Ann Keniston (New York: Routledge, 2008), 224-241.  Read.

“The Way We Read Now: Oprah Winfrey, Intellectuals and Democracy” in The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprah’s Book Clubedited by Cecilia Konchar Farr and Jaime Harker (Albany, NY: State University of New York University Press, 2008).  Read.

“The Democratic Literature of the Future: Richard Rorty and the American Poetic Tradition” in Histories of Postmodernism edited by Mark Bevir, Jill Hargis and Sara Rushing, (New York: Routledge, 2007), 193-214.  Read.

“Written and Unwritten America: Roth on Reading, Politics and Theory” reprinted in Between Terror and Freedom; Philosophy and Fiction Speak of Modernity edited by Frederick Dolan and Simona Goi (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 361-374.  Read.

“Worlds Apart: Ursula K. Le Guin and the Possibility of Method” in The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed edited by Laurence A. Davis and Peter G. Stillman (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), 37-51.  Read.

“The Return of Charles Kinbote: Nabokov on Rorty” reprinted in Twentieth Century Literary Criticism Vol. 108 (Farmington Hills: Gale Group, 2001).  Read.