My research mainly deals with popular fiction and the various ways that Americans have represented themselves, their fears and their desires in it throughout the long twentieth century. For the past several years I've been particularly interested in Evangelical Christian popular culture and fiction and the Evangelical “Imagination,” the structure of images and stories and ways of thinking that this group of people tends to lean on to articulate the way they understand the world and their place in it.

I grew up on a small farm in the Slate River Valley, outside of Thunder Bay. Before coming to Laurier Brantford I worked at several places, including Palacky University in Olomouc, Czech Republic, McMaster in Hamilton, SUNY Buffalo and, for several years, Dalhousie University in Halifax. Since coming to Laurier in 2007, I have administered the Contemporary Studies (2011-14), and English (2014-2021) programs, and have taught in these along with the Foundations stream and in both the English and Cultural Analysis and Social Theory (CAST) graduate programs. I also oversee the biennial Laurier Stedman Prize for Young Writers, a short fiction contest for high school students in the Brantford, Grand Erie and Six Nations areas.

I like to spend my spare time with my kids, but seeing as how they’re in their teens and twenties now, I often have to do the next best things, such as swimming and finding new trails on my old mountain bike. I try to spend as much time as I can in the country North of Superior hoping my knees won’t give out as I try to keep up with my partner on the various killer hikes that she loves.

I am currently working on a series of articles that deal with the way American Evangelical culture organizes the stories and images it uses to articulate understandings of how people act and fit into the world (in its natural and supernatural dimensions). These articles are the basis for a book provisionally entitled The Evangelical Imagination in the End Times of White Evangelical America.

I currently teach the following undergraduate courses in English:

• EN 111: Literature and Crime
• EN 218: Contemporary American Literature.
• EN 264: The American Tradition (special topics course on Moby Dick)
• EN 265: American Literature before the 20th Century.
• EN 266: American Literature of the Early 20th Century.
• EN 301: Literary Theory

Every couple of years I teach a course in the English Graduate Program entitled:

• EN 692w: Fantasy and the Modern Social Imagination

I have taught (and may again teach):

• EN 692x: Evangelical Fiction and American Faith.
• CQ 642: Jesus Junk and Redneck Pride: Class and Consumption in “White” America.

• “Allegory in Modern Christian Fiction.”  The Oxford Handbook of Allegory, ed. David Parry. Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2022.
• “Encoding Race as Cultural Revanchism in Contemporary Evangelical Fiction.”  Post45 Contemporaries. Post45.org.  Forthcoming, June 2022.
• Review of Daniel Silliman’s Reading Evangelicals: How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and a Faith (Eerdmans, 2021). American Literary History, Review XXXII. (forthcoming, 2022).
• “Types and Tropes: History and Moral Agency in Evangelical Inspirational Fiction.” Christianity & Literature, vol 69, no 1, March 2020, pp. 73-90.
• “Unsafe Fantasy: Faith, the Fantastic and the Evangelical Imagination.” The Journal of American Culture, vol. 42, no. 3, Sept 2019, pp. 229-241. doi.org/10.1111/jacc.13071  
• with Robert Feagan.  "The Role of Academe in Enhancing Civil Society Engagement." in Patricia Daenzer, Ed. Civil Society Engagement: Achieving Better in Canada.  Routledge, 2018, pp. 31-46.
• “Typological Realism and Contemporary Evangelical Fiction: Tragedy, Eternity and The Shack." English Studies in Canada 37.1 Spring 2012.
• "Homiletic Realism,” a review of Jackson, Gregory, The Word and Its Witness: The Spiritualization of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 22.2.  Summer 2010.
• "Romance Narrative in Conservative Evangelical Homiletic." The Educated Imagination.
• "Separation of Church and Fourth Estate" a review of Marci MacDonald's The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada.  J-source
• with David Haskell and Stephanie Burgoyne. “Defending the Faith: Easter Sermon Reaction to Pop Culture Discourses. Review of Religious Research. 50.2 (2008), 139-156.
• Sex, Paranoia and Modern Masculinity. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006.