ARTICLES & CHAPTERS
See separate section for Interviews with Authors, including published interviews.
“From Your Farflung Correspondant,” Omnium Gatherum Quarterly 8, 2022
“Gravy Donuts, 24/7,” in Juan Felipe Herrera, a collection of essays edited by Francisco Lomeli, forthcoming 2022
“Gravy Donuts,” Iowa Review, forthcoming 2022
“The Best Books of Travel Writing,” Shepherd.com, 2021
“Coming to LA: Images of the Migrant City,” Pratik: A Magazine of Contemporary Writing, ed. Yuyutsu Sharma, March 2021
“Chinggis Kahn, the Nomad Steppe, and the Mongolian Sublime,” Red Dirt Forum, April 2020
“#5onFri: Five Ways Famous Writers Coped With Failure,” DIY MFA, 2020
“The Movie-Made Self,” an introduction to Merton of the Movies, by Harry Leon Wilson, LARB Classics, 2019
“In the Shadow of the Archive,” In The Critic as Amateur. Ed. Saikat Majumdar and Aarthi Vadde. Bloomsbury Press, 2019
“La Femme en Noir,” LALA. Fall 2017
“Behagen und Unbehagen aud der Matratze,” in Matratze/Matrize: Mobelierung von Subjekt und Gesellschaft, ed. Irene Nierhaus and Kathrin Heinz. Transcript, 2016.
“Publishing,” LALA. Summer 2017
“The Commons as Network,” ASAP/Journal, Vol. 1. Vol. 1: 1, 2016.
“Plov Day in Tashkent,” in Litscapes, ed. Caitlin M. Alvarez and Kass Fleisher. Steerage Press, 2015
[/fusion_text]“There’s No Writer’s Block in the Newsroom,” Los Angeles Review of Books, April 5, 2015
“Notes from the Albanian Diaspora,” The Iowa Review. 2014
“Multiculturalism in Iran,” Santa Monica Review, Fall 2013
“The Lyrical Essay,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 2012
“My Daily Read,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 2012
“Future Tense,” Los Angeles Review of Books, August 6, 2011
“Secretions,” in Morceaux Equis, Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires, CNRS, Paris, 2011
“Cather and the Regional Imagination,” essay invited for The Cambridge History of the American Novel, ed. Clare Eby, Leonard Cassuto, and Benjamin Reiss, Cambridge University Press, 2011
“Occupied Tibet,” photo-essay, connotationpress.com, 2010
“Palabras, Palabras, Palabras,” fiction, Hermano Cerdo (Mexico), 2010
“Writing,” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, 2010
“Crimean Chords,” essay, Black Clock 12, 2010
“Writing about Images,” invited for Sherry Ellis, ed., Now Write!: Nonfiction Exercises from Today’s Best Writers and Teachers, Tarcher/Penguin, 2009
“The Poet,” Revista PingPong (Dominican Republic), 2009
“Crocodile tears, or, Method Acting in Everyday Life,” in Brooke Harrington, ed., Deception, Stanford University Press, 2009
“The Job Interview,” ZYZZYVA Winter, 2008
“Teaching Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem,” in Teaching the Harlem Renaissance: Course Design and Classroom Strategies, ed. Michael Soto, Peter Lang, 2008
“Floating with Alice,” Exquisite Corpse, April 2008
“Town Criers: Hillary and Mitt,” New Republic, 20 January 2007
“The Cosmopolitan Midland and the Academic Writer,” in Suzanne Churchill and Adam McKible, eds., Little Magazines and Modernism. Ashgate, 2007
“Flucht ins Pure Gefühl,” Die Zeit Wissen, April 2007
“Lost: The Gigging Life, Part 43,” Crate, 2007
“Think You Know How to Read, Do You?” homepage, salon.com, March 2007
“The Coloring of Memory,” essay in Dorothy Braudy: Paintings, February 2006
“Humiliation,” essay invited for Black Clock, Fall 2005
“Spending Time,” essay invited for R.L. Rutsky and Sande Cohen, Consumption in an Age of Information, New York University Press, 2005
“Coda,” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, Spring 2005
“The Cosmopolitan Midland,” American Periodicals 15:1 (Fall 2005)
“Catharsis,” [excerpt], http://www.freud.org.uk/cryingtext.html, 2004
“Male Weepies and the Roles of Melodrama,” essay invited for When Boys Do Cry: Rethinking Masculinity and Emotion in America, ed. Jennifer Travis and Millette Shamir, Columbia University Press, 2002
“Varieties of Medical Experience: Doctors and Patients, Psyche and Soma in America,” essay invited for Cultures of Neurasthenia From Beard to the First World War, ed. Roy Porter and Marijke Gijswijt, Amsterdam: Wellcome Institute/Rodolpi, 2001
“Is Gossip Good?” Beliefnet: Spirituality, Religion, Morality, Faith, Belief, Community, www.beliefnet.com, 12 February 2000
“Claude McKay: Music, Sexualities, and Literary Cosmopolitanism,” essay invited for Saadi A. Simawe, ed., Black Orpheus: Music in African American Fiction from the Harlem Renaissance to Toni Morrison, Border Crossings, Volume 9, Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, Garland Publishing, 2000
“Cosmopolitan Vistas: Willa Cather, Hamlin Garland, and the Literary Value of Regionalism,” in Robert F. Sayre, ed., Recovering the Prairie, University of Wisconsin Press, 1999
“‘Sweat or Die!’: The Hedonization of the Work Ethic in the 1920s and the End of the Leisure Class,” American Literary History Fall 1996
“The Cultural History of Neurasthenia,” article invited for A History of Clinical Psychiatry, ed. German Barrios and Roy Porter, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine and Athlone Press, 1995
“The Future is Not Around the Corner,” introduction to special issue on the Future of the Profession, Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association Spring 1994
“Culture Wars, the Management of Diversity, and the Burning of Los Angeles,” American Studies in Scandinavia, Spring 1993
“Curing The Blues: W. E. B. Du Bois, Fashionable Diseases, and Degraded Music in 1903,” Black Music Research Journal, invited article for special issue on literary theory and musicology, ed. Bruce Tucker, Fall, 1991
“Foucault’s Paradigm, Kuhn’s Epistème,” Constructions I, Fall 1989