Carolyn has scholarly interests in the Southwest and American regionalism, environmental literature, and multi-ethnic American literature.
Carolyn is the editor of A Drama of the Southwest: The Critical Edition of a Forgotten Play, which brought Jean Toomer’s 1935 play to publication for the first time. It provides new insight into the later career of a brilliant Harlem Renaissance writer and into the Taos, New Mexico art community with which he interacted throughout the 1930s and 40s. This book is published by the University of New Mexico Press.
Press for A Drama of the Southwest:
Vinson Cunningham, “Jean Toomer’s Odd, Keening A Drama of the Southwest,” The New Yorker.
Other Scholarship
“Jean Toomer Sojourner: Striking Experience in the South and Southwest,” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 2014; doi: 10.1093/melus/mlu049.
“The Lost Women of Silko’s Ceremony.” Leslie Marmon Silko: Ceremony/ Almanac of the Dead/ Gardens in the Dunes, ed. David L. Moore. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.
“Survival is Insufficient: Northern Michigan as a Post-Apocalyptic Final Frontier,” Upper Country: A Journal of the Lake Superior Region. v. 5 2017.
“From Father Berrigan to Black Lives Matter: Literary Representations of Peace Activism Since 1945,” A History of World Peace Since 1750, ed. Bill Knoblauch and Christian Petersen, New York: Routledge 2018.
“Willa Cather’s Southwestern Grave Robbers,” Western American Literature, 54.4 2020: 415-439.