Having been raised not in a barn but directly adjacent to one, I am just half-coarse, indecent only at intervals. (No poet—and an academic is something less than that—has ever claimed more than a fitful inspiration.) I bring scatology to bear on culinary cultures, pop music, black studies and animal studies, usually with the help of American novels of the last hundred years. Recently I've been thinking about long-term cross-disciplinary narratives of modernity, as well as twentieth century American writers' fascinations with the European Middle Ages. I received a B.A. from Duke University in 2019.