forthcoming -
“’It’s All Interconnected’: Naming as Representational
Affirmative Action and Character Development in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty,” English Studies. Spring 2019.
(online 29 November 2018), https://doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2018.1519219
This essay examines through Smith’s protagonists Howard
and Kiki Belsey how communal decisions about children (including choices of name and conceptions about
identity) reveal shared or disparate ethical and ideological understandings of what we are as human persons
and how we should be in the world.
2018 -
“Trauma and the Anthropocene: Fear and Loathing in Helen
Macdonald’s H is for Hawk,” International Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE), Vol. 25, No.
3, Fall 2018, pp. forthcoming
Macdonald’s intriguing memoir imbricates genres and fields
of history, sociology, nature writing, biography and more. I look at cultural currents of insecurity
that undergird Macdonald’s aesthetic and philosophic trajectory. I explicate how—while few people will
train a bird of prey as reparation, psychological growth, or emotional healing—her experiences of personal
tragedy are both particular and universal.
2018 -
“Love the Jackalope: Historicity, Relational Identity,
and Naming in David Foster Wallace’s ‘Lyndon’.” College Literature. Vol. 45.4, Fall 2018, pp. 745-70.
David Foster Wallace’s work has become a flashpoint in
discussions of gender and aesthetic privilege and merit. While the artist is not completely separable
from the work, the work is not reducible to the artist. I ground Wallace’s struggle with pictures of
love as specifically engaging these questions of who and how we are as flawed human persons, engaging
them as an intrinsically ethical picture congruous with best literature deserving our attention.
2018 -
“A Good BET: Forming the Thesis.” Criteria 2018-2019:
Discernment and Discourse Reader and Guide. Vanessa Hopper and Ona Seaney, Editors. Kendall Hunt, 199-201.
Directed to a student audience, this guide provides information
and a systematic, delineated example of how to form a strong thesis which covers all the necessary points
of Aristotelian logic. Using pop culture primary sources to garner attention, I utilize the seemingly
disjunct categories of Goldilocks and Pokemon to show how a logically sequential, interesting, and contemporaneously
relevant argument can be composed.
2017 -
“A Good BET: Forming the Thesis.” Criteria 2017-2018:
Discernment and Discourse Reader and Guide. Vanessa Hopper and Ona Seaney, Editors. Kendall Hunt, 205-7.
Earlier version of this essay.
Directed to a student audience, this guide provides information
and a systematic, delineated example of how to form a strong thesis which covers all the necessary points
of Aristotelian logic. Using pop culture primary sources to garner attention, I utilize the seemingly
disjunct categories of Goldilocks and Pokemon to show how a logically sequential, interesting, and contemporaneously
relevant argument can be composed.
Directed Student Research Co-Authored Essays:
2016 -
Lenczycki, Alexandra and LeeAnn Derdeyn. “Empathy Factor:
How Louisiana Can Treat Mental Illness.” Journal of Undergraduate Research and Scholarly Excellence,
Volume VII, Number 1, Fall, pp. 1-3. http://hdl.handle.net/10217/178345
While written by one of my first-year students, I was
instrumental in guiding Alex in the composition of her thesis and trajectory of her argument, and in
seeing how to use one of our classroom texts as foundation for an argument relating to a real-world problem
of her own experience.
forthcoming -
“The Trouble with Travel: Environment in Leontia Flynn’s
‘The Furthest Distances I’ve Travelled’.” The Green World in Contemporary Poetry and Philosophy: Mapping
Nature in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, Cristina M. Gámez and Leonor M. Martínez, Editors. University
of Cordoba, Spring 2019.
forthcoming -
“Cantos LXIV-LXVI: “Geopolitics, Ecopoetics, and the Southern
Agrarians in Pound’s Adams Cantos,” Readings in The Cantos, Vol. 2, Richard Parker, Editor. Clemson UP
and concurrently, Liverpool UP, Fall 2019.
2018 -
Derdeyn, LeeAnn and Redman, Tim. “Canto XXX: Pound’s Emergent
Ecology,” Readings in The Cantos, Vol. I. Richard Parker, Editor. Clemson UP, and concurrently Liverpool
UP, Spring 2018.