From the Busy Basement

I will be updating this page with papers I have written, given at conferences, and/or published.  If you have any questions about, comments on, or suggestions for further development of anything posted here, feel free to email me.  I encourage you to use these pieces as resources for your own research, but gently remind that they are all posted here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.

Essays

The Significance of Old Ned (PDF)
Short essay responding to the importance of the character Old Ned in Micheaux's Within Our Gates (1920) and the absence of the character in Jacqueline Najuma Stewart's Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity.

Audibly Absurd: Audio Exaggeration and the American Dream in Raising Arizona (PDF)
In this essay, I argue that the exaggerated audio track is vital to understanding the critique or parodies of the American Dream in Raising Arizona (1987), and examine the contributions of exaggerated accents, sound effects, and music to the film's larger themes.

Papers

"Come see a fat, old man sometime!" Masculinity and Aging in True Grit and Unforgiven (PDF)
This paper, written in partial completion of the requirements for the Master of Arts in Cultural Studies at Claremont Graduate University, analyzes the complex negotiations of aging and masculinity in True Grit (1969) and Unforgiven (1992).  I previously posted the abstract here.