It’s been a few months since I’ve updated the site. I spent part of this morning beefing up the security (again), and updating. And I’ve been busy over the last months trying to find a permanent position, sharing some work at MLA, working to wrap up the first year of Integrated Studies at Penn, attending Penn’s inaugural THATCamp, and helping my historical fiction and fantasy seminar produce an Omeka collection. More on all of these heads shortly.

But I wanted to announce that I’ll be heading to Los Angeles to take up a AP position in the English department at USC. I can’t figure out the trumpeting voice I need to communicate how excited/relieved/sapped I feel in joining the faculty there (and rejoining some old friends). It feels like the culmination of decades of work. Sure, it marks another stage, but reaching this place has often seemed not only elusive but impossible.

I have too many people to thank for the care that helped me get here. I’ve been thinking about all of the big and little things people have done for me, taught to me, fixed for me. The workshops, seminars, hours of critique and late night commiserations given by friends and colleagues at Rutgers. The years my committee spent with my work. The chance to come to Penn and soak up a new intellectual climate and make a whole new set of friends and colleagues. These things change the course of your professional life. And now I get to head west to join a campus that’s crackling with energy and innovation. The future is filled with possibility. And in the path-dependent way of all living systems, those possibilities are firmly grounded in the chances and opportunities I’ve been given by others. Happy to be in a place where I can start to do the same for others.