For my graduate work in American Studies I focused on Early American Literature and Culture and wrote my dissertation on seventeenth-century New England funeral sermons and the development of biography. I have continued to research and teach Early American literature and culture and also teach business writing regularly. Recently, my teaching and research interests have shifted toward postmodernism and contemporary American literature. I have written and taught on Kathy Acker and am currently writing on Acker’s use of Trilogy of Liberation by the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo.

Growing out of my work on Acker, I have begun to work in gender and queer theory, particularly in American popular culture and regularly present on gender in popular culture at the Popular Culture Association Conference. I have completed an article on Bayard Taylor’s novel Joseph and His Friend and have begun a study of the construction of identity in gay detective fiction.

I am a member of the Modern Language Association (and currently serve on the Delegate Assembly), the Popular Culture Association, and American Studies Association.

Selected Publications

“Re-Educating the Body: Kathy Acker, Georges Bataille, and the Postmodern Body in My Mother, Demonology.” In Devouring Institutions: The Life Work of Kathy Acker. Ed. Michael Hardin. (2006)

“Faulkner’s Teeth” Rendezvous: A Journal of Arts and Letters. (2004)

“Being Dead She Yet Lives: The Rhetorical Work of America’s First Funeral Sermon.” Studies in Puritan American Spirituality. Ed. Michael Schuldiner. (1997)

“Primitivism and Postmodernism in Kathy Acker’s Kathy Goes to Haiti.” Studies in the Humanities. (1994)

Courses Taught

• AMST 200, Introduction to American Studies
• ENGL 277, Survey of American Lit I
• ENGL 278, Survey of American Lit II
• ENGL 308, Business Writing
• ENGL 469, Contemporary Literature
• ENGL 672, Major Figures: William Faulkner

Office: LA 207-D
Office Phone: 282-2610
engeterr@isu.edu