I am a U.S.-born independent scholar and teacher with an international background. My academic training is in literary and media studies, with a side of linguistics and comparative religion. I have lived and worked on three continents, and hope to continue expanding my perspective.

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My current research interests turn an insider-outsider view on American studies, specifically political discourse; the domestic discursive history of tropes, biases, and stereotypes; and the phenomenological and epistemological divide between the contemporary U.S. right and the global Western consensus in matters of history, science, and modern (i.e., specifically post-Enlightenment and/or post-Reformation) paradigms of knowledge and belief. 

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Other interests and previous research topics include: science fiction and modes of the fantastic; animation, comic books, graphic novels, and the bande dessinée as expressive modes; superhero comics, fiction and media in U.S. and comparative contexts; discourses of gender and sexuality in cross-cultural and cross-generational perspectives; and religion in cultural, political and comparative contexts.

I know French and Spanish, and have more modest competence in several other European and non-European languages.

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I am currently particularly interested in:

* 21st-c. U.S.-Europe comparative beliefs and practices  (centered on historical epistemology, understandings of "state," "people," and "religion," and assumptions about civil rights, "the point of a country," and the ethics of resource distribution)

* The post-1980s Christian neoliberal fundamentalist "revolution"

* Global-outlier characteristics of contemporary U.S. fundamentalist Christianity

* Contemporary U.S. mainstream and "official" rejections of modernity, scientific method, and Copernican decentering

* The origins and effects of the U.S.'s divided historical, civil and scientific public-educational curricula: split epistemologies, "double-blind" cultural concealments, multiple instantiations of "dual consciousness," and "Confederate" vs. "Northern" paradigms for understanding history, economics, law, violence, honor, crime, and biology

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Other concepts & keywords: epistemology, discourse, history of tropes and ideas, belief, anti-modernity, and processes of dehumanization.

"I am passionate about understanding the world around us and sharing my insights with others": <- A sentence wix.com asked if I wanted AI to "write for [me]." I am also interested in the increasing intrusion of AI into interpersonal discursive contexts, commercial and otherwise.