My academic research focuses on utopianism, music-making and 20th/21st-century American literature. My creative work examines Canadian immigration, Central European politics, historical memory and art-making in the context of the short story.

• Winner, Gold Medal for Fiction, 2014 National Magazine Awards.
• Shortlisted for the 2013 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award.
• Winner, 2012 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.
• Shortlisted for the 2012 Governor General's Literary Award: Fiction.
• Chosen as the best Book of 2012 by Now.

I am willing to supervise graduate students in the areas of 20th-century American literature, post-structural theory, music and literature, and utopianism.

• "Communities of Self: Mavis Gallant's Linnet Muir Cycle." Journal of the Short Story in English 69 (2017): 111-31.
• "Returning to Places of No Return in Stuart Dybek's Short Stories." Identity, Diaspora and Return in American Literature. Maria Antónia Oliver-Rotger ed. New York: Routledge, 2015. 189-205.
• "Dybek's Diaspora." Mobile Narratives: Travel, Migration, and Transculturation. Eleftheria Arapoglou, Mónika Fodor, & Jopi Nyman eds. New York: Routledge, 2014. 226-39.
• "The Writing of Trespass." Canadian Literature 218 (2013): 11-28.
• "Raymond Carver in the Viewfinder." Canadian Review of American Studies 41.3 (2011): 279-98.
• "Improvising Chicago." Critical Studies in Improvisation/ Études critiques en improvisation 5.1 (2009): 1-11. Web. 20 Jan. 2010.
• "The Morrison Songbook: Proliferation in Jazz." Mosaic 42.1 (2009): 199-215.
• "Burning Montana: Richard Ford's Wildlife and Regional Crisis." All Our Stories Are Here: Critical Perspectives on Montana Literature. Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 2009. 3-20.
• "McCarthy's Mailmen: The Cold War, Raymond Carver, and 'What Do You Do in San Francisco?'" New Paths to Raymond Carver: Critical Essays on His Life, Fiction, and Poetry. Eds. Sandra Lee Kleppe and Robert Miltner. Columbia: U South Carolina P, 2008. 115-31.
• "A Devout Life: Reading Graham Greene through St. Frances de Sales." Lonely Without God: Graham Greene's Quixotic Journey of Faith. Ed. William Thomas Hill. Dublin: Academica, 2007. 223-48.
• "Gathering up God's Remains: The Practice of Michel de Certeau—An Introduction to What Can Only Ever Be an Introduction." The Strategic Smorgasbord of Post-Modernity: Literature and the Christian Critic. Ed. Deborah C. Bowen. Newcastle, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars, 2007. 173-91.
• "How Not to Be a 'Dickhead': Partisan Politics in Richard Ford's Independence Day." Critical Survey 18.1 (2006): 40-59.
• “The Holocaust as Fiction: Derrida’s Demeure and the Demjanjuk Trial in Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock.” Philip Roth Studies 1.1 (2005): 37-52.
• “Playing at the Nth Note: John Coltrane and Proliferation.” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 37.1/1 (2004): 109-27.
• “Africa and Catholic Crisis: Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter and A Burnt-Out Case.” Perceptions of Religious Faith in the Work of Graham Greene. Ed. Wm. Thomas Hill.  New York: Peter Lang, 2002: 427-58.
• “In the Country of Contradiction the Hypocrite is King: Defining Dirty Realism in Charles Bukowski’s Factotum.” Modern Fiction Studies 47.1 (Spring 2001): 43-68.
• “Lhasa Unlimited: The Metaphysics of Death in Steven Heighton’s The Admen Move on Lhasa and ‘Translations of April.’” Essays on Canadian Writing 73 (Spring 2001): 184-207.
• "'Designed Anarchy' in Mavis Gallant's The Moslem Wife and Other Stories." Canadian Literature 158 (Autumn 1998): 65-88.