TIMOTHY PARRISH, Associate Professor, B.A. Trinity University; A.M. University of Chicago; Ph.D. University of Washington. Professor Parrish studies and teaches contemporary American literature and culture, with secondary expertise in ethnic studies, pragmatism, and popular culture.

Professor Parrish's first book, Walking Blues: Making Americans from Emerson to Elvis (University of Massachusetts, 2001), documents how seemingly incompatible interests in national and racial identity are brought together in American culture through a longstanding commitment to understanding identity as integrally connected to what one becomes rather than as who or what one is born. His second book, From the Civil War to the Apocalypse: Postmodern History and American Fiction (University of Massachusetts, forthcoming, 2008), reconsiders the relationship between history and fiction in a postmodern context, concluding that history, not identity, is the ground of postmodern American fiction.

Professor Parrish also recently edited The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth (Cambridge University Press, 2007). He has published widely on contemporary fiction in such journals as Modern Fiction Studies, Contemporary Literature, Prospects, Arizona Quarterly, Texas Studies in Language and Literature, Studies in American Fiction, Clio, Critique, Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature, Studies in American Jewish Literature, and Journal of American Culture.

REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICATIONS

Books

• From the Civil War to the Apocalypse: History in Twentieth-Century American Fiction (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008).
• Walking Blues: Making Americans from Emerson to Elvis (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).
• The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Selected Essays and Journal Articles

• "After Henry Adams: Rewriting History in Joan Didion's Democracy." Critique 47.2 (2006): 167-84.
• "Invisible Ellison: The Fight to be a Negro Leader." In Ross Posnock, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005): 137-156.
• "Becoming Black: Zuckerman's Bifurcating Self in Human Stain" in Derek Parker Royal, ed., Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author (London: Praeger Press, 2005): 209-224.
• "Ralph Ellison: The Invisible Man in Philip Roth's The Human Stain." Contemporary Literature 45.3 (Fall 2004): 421-59.
• "Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!: The True History of the South." Prospects 29 ( 2004): 1-39.
• "Nabokov, Dostoevski, Proust: Despair." Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature 28.2 (2004): 445-77.
• "Imagining Jews in Philip Roth's Operation Shylock." Rpt. in Philip Roth. Ed. Harold Bloom. (New York: Chelsea House, 2003), pp. 119-43.
• "Creation's Covenant: The Art of Cynthia Ozick." Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 43.4 (2001): 440-64.
• "Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son: To Kingdom Come." Critique, 43.1 (Fall 2001): 17-29.
• "Texas Schoolbook: The History Lessons of Don DeLillo's Libra." Clio 30.1 (2000): 1-31.
• "From Hoover's F.B.I. to Eisenstein's Unterwelt: Don DeLillo Writes the Postmodern Novel." MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 45.3 (Fall 1999): 696-723.
• "Ralph Ellison, Kenneth Burke, and the Form of Democracy." Arizona Quarterly 52.3 (Autumn 1995): 117-48.
• "Our White Whale, Elvis; or, Democracy Sighted." Prospects 20 (1995): 329-60.