CONTACT INFORMATION

Greenlaw Hall, 325, CB# 3250
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520
(919) 843-2088

EDUCATION

Ph.D., Indiana University, 2006
M.A., University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 1996
B.A., University of Mississippi, 1989

RESEARCH INTERESTS

My research interests center on material culture, with a particular emphasis on landscapes and the social use and meaning of the built environment. I take an ethnographic approach to the study of built forms and landscapes—barns, cellars, houses, parade routes—always striving to understand sites and structures as social spaces that acquire and generate meaning through human action. My current project examines land and landscapes as expressive resources and as forms of economic and cultural capital in south-central Appalachia. Other interests include North African shantytowns, home and domestic culture, and life and work in rural America. Before returning to graduate school to pursue my PhD in folklore, I taught writing and literature in the English and Modern Languages Departments at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette and was a Fulbright Lecturer at Hassan II University in Mohammedia, Morocco.

COURSES TAUGHT AT UNC

FOLK 850 Approaches to Folklore Theory
FOLK 550 Introduction to Material Culture
AMST 483 Seeing America: Visual Culture and American Studies
AMST 482 American Landscapes
AMST 390 Home Sweet Home: The American House in Critical Perspective
FOLK 202 Introduction to Folklore