Previously he held the E. Lee Oliver Fagan Chair of Bible and Religion at Chowan College in Murfreesboro. In 1987 and 1988 he held a fellowship at the University of Tel Aviv's Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, where he also conducted research for A Poetics of Jonah. He is the author of Reading Esther: A Case for Literary Carnivalesque (1995) and of several journal articles on the subject of the Bible and narrative art.