His published scholarship focuses on regional definition in relation to national and transnational contexts, modes of cultural memory, and connections between cultural and aesthetic forms, especially in their potential to record historical pressures and transitions. He has written about several contemporary writers and filmmakers, including Robert Penn Warren, Derek Walcott, James Dickey, Harryette Mullen, Andrew Hudgins, and Wes Anderson. He has also conducted interviews with Pulitzer Prize-winning poets Charles Wright, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Natasha Trethewey. His current research project engages with conjunctions and conflicts between primitivism (aesthetic, philosophical, ethnographic, ecological), modernity, and Southernness in the literature and cinema of the transforming U.S. South from 1919 to the present. He is Co-Editor of the Southern literature listserv on H-Net (H-Southern-Lit).