Political and Cultural Commentary
- Trump and the Rules of Celebrity Politics, Interview, Bloomberg Opinion, May 2018
- Herman Melville’s April Fool, The Confidence Man, The Huffington Post, April 2017
- The Carnival Campaign: How Robert Coover’s 1968 Short Story Foresaw 2016, Chronicle Review, Nov 2016
- This Presidential Birthday Was Worth Dozens of Speeches, Time magazine, Oct 2016
- Phyllis Schlafly and the Kingmakers, The Huffington Post, Sept 2016
- The Not-So Glamorous Origins of American Celebrity Politics, Oxford UP, Aug 2016
- An excerpt from Liking Ike, Weekend Reader, The National Memo, July 2016
- Historians on Donald Trump (Public Facebook video), July 2016
- The Broadway Song That Nominated a President, Oxford UP Blog, June 2016
- In the Father’s House: McCain’s and Obama’s Memoirs, Chronicle Review, Sept 2008
- McCain and My Captive Cadets, The Huffington Post, Sept 2008
- A Prophetic Face in the Crowd, Common Dreams, Nov 2007
Literary Criticism
- Longfellow and the Campaign for Poets’ Corner, Critical Survey, 2015. Please see the final, published version in Critical Survey 27:3 (December 2015) for citation.
- When Readers Become Fans: 19th-Century Poetry as a Fan Activity, American Studies, 2012
- Whitman’s Ecclesiastes: The 1860 “Leaves of Grass” Cluster, Huntington Library Quarterly, 2010
- Reading Whitman, Growing Up Rock ‘n’ Roll, Virginia Quarterly Review, 2005
Creative
- Addicted to Fame: From the Greeks to Lady Gaga, Humanities, Fall 2017
- On Writing and Rearing, Papa PhD: Essays on Fatherhood by Men in the Academy, 2011