Keith M. Wilhite

I joined the English Faculty at Siena College in Fall 2011. I received my M.A. in English from Saint Louis University (2000) and my Ph.D. in English from The University of Iowa (2007). From 2007-2011, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University.

My Siena Experience

My Teaching Philosophy

What I Love About Siena

The best part of teaching at Siena is the opportunity to work with students across multiple courses and in multiple different learning environments: the classroom, advising sessions, independent studies, and Honors theses. It's rewarding to see students mature as individuals and scholars over the arc of their academic careers. Through their essays and our classroom discussions, I gain valuable insight into how they understand the significance of the written word and how literary texts connect them to the broader world of culture, politics, ethics, and social relations.  

My Favorite Courses to Teach

My Professional Experience

Current Research

My research primarily focuses on 20th and 21st century American literature and culture, and my scholarship draws broadly on the fields of urban studies, sociology, U.S. history, critical regionalism, and narrative theory. I have published articles on Richard Wright's Black Boy (Prose Studies), Walt Whitman's early notebooks and poetry (ELH), John Cheever's Shady Hill stories (Studies in American Fiction), Willa Cather's My Ántonia (Studies in the Novel), Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go (Arizona Quarterly), Jhumpa Lahiri's short stories (MELUS), and the suburbs as a new "national region" in Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides (MFS), Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and Chang-rae Lee's Aloft (in American Literature). Most of these projects share a common goal: to explore literary texts as aesthetic forms that produce a certain kind of engagement with the places and practices of everyday life. Recently, this research has culminated in the publication of my book, Contested Terrain: Suburban Fiction and US Regionalism, 1945–2020 (University of Iowa Press, 2022).

Articles & Book Reviews

• One House at a Time: Democratic Citizenship and Domestic Security in Clybourne Park
  MidAmerica, vol. 47
  2020
• Aggressive Tendencies: Lolita and the Conscripted Reader
  Nabokov Studies, vol. 13
  2014
• Contested Terrain: The Suburbs as Region
  American Literature, vol. 84
  September, 2012
• A Yearning for a Kind of Consciousness: Black Boy and the Aesthetic Solution
  Prose Studies, vol. 22
  April, 1999
• Blank Spaces: Outdated Maps and Unsettled Subjects in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies
  MELUS: Mult-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., vol. 41
  Summer, 2016
• Face the House: Suburban Domesticity and Nation as Home in The Virgin Suicides
  Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 61
  Spring, 2015
• Girls Gone Wrong: Whiteness and the Economy of Desire
  Midwestern Miscellany, vol. 41
  Spring, 2013
• His Mind Was Full of Absences: Whitman at the Scene of Writing
  ELH, vol. 71
  Winter, 2004
• John Cheever's Shady Hill, Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Suburbs
  Studies in American Fiction, vol. 34
  Fall, 2006
• Mapping Black and Brown L.A.: Zoot Suit Riots as Spatial Subtext in If He Hollers Let Him Go
  Arizona Quarterly, vol. 66
  Summer, 2010
• Unsettled Worlds: Aesthetic Emplacement in Willa Cather's My Ántonia
  Studies in the Novel, vol. 42
  Fall, 2010

Books & Book Chapters

• Contested Terrain: Suburban Fiction and U.S. Regionalism, 1945–2020
  University of Iowa Press
  2022
• American Literature in Transition, 1950-1960
  Cambridge University Press
  2018
• The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies
  Oxford Universtiy Press
  2017
• The City since 9/11: Literature, Film, Television (edited collection)
  Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
  2016

Presentations

• It Happens One House at a Time: From Race Pioneers to "Post-Racial" Gentrification
  May, 2020
  Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, Chicago, Illinois
• Private Eyes: Mapping the Megalopolis in Thomas Pynchon's California.
  June, 2019
  International Pynchon Week, Rome, Italy
• Serious Fictions: Neoliberalism, Literary Value, and Suburban Culture
  November, 2017
  Suburbia: An Archaeology of the Moment, Toulouse, France
• Literature and Community-Engaged Learning: A Faculty-Undergraduate Collaboration.
  May, 2017
  Engage for Change: Engaging Diverse Communities, Loudonville, New York
• Bringing the 'Burbs to Harlem: Home Building in Ann Petry's The Street
  2017
  Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, Louisville, Kentucky
• Domestic Unrest: Immigrant Families and the Housing Crisis in Jung Yun's Shelter
  2017
  Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the U.S. conference, Cambridge, Massachusetts
• The End of Private Property: Fallen Land and the Perils of Home Ownership
  May, 2014
  American Literature Association, Washington, District of Columbia
• Imagining a Community of Readers in the Era of Suburban Sprawl
  June, 2013
  The Cultures of the Suburbs International Research Network, Second Symposium, Hempstead, New York
• History Against the Grain: Teju Cole's Open City
  March, 2013
  NEMLA, Boston, Massachusetts
• The Suburbs in Popular Culture, or: How did we get from Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best to Desperate Housewives and Family Guy
  November, 2012
  Chapman Historical Museum, Glens Falls, New York
• Unsettling Subjects: Amateur Cartography in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies
  November, 2011
  MMLA (Midwestern Modern Language Association), St. Louis, Missouri
• Aggressive Tendencies: Lolita and the Conscripted Reader
  January, 2011
  MLA, Los Angeles, California
• The Emerging Global City in Oscar Zeta Acosta's Revolt of the Cockroach People
  January, 2011
  MLA, Los Angeles, California
• Moving Out: Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and the Future of Suburbia
  April, 2010
  NEMLA, Montreal, Canada-Quebec
• Lolita and the Science of Sex
  February, 2009
  NEMLA, Boston, Massachusetts
• The Trouble with Midwestern Roots: Jonathan Franzen's Oprah Problem
  November, 2008
  MMLA (Midwestern Modern Language Association), Minneapolis, Minnesota
• Framing the Suburbs: Destabilizing America's Insular Geographies
  October, 2007
  American Studies Association, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Pornography Begins at Home: Erotic Fantasy and Domestic Abuse in Paula Vogel's Hot 'N' Throbbing
  November, 2005
  MMLA (Midwestern Modern Language Association), Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• A Midwestern Postmortem: Jeffrey Eugenides's Suburban Suicides
  May, 2005
  SSML (Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature), East Lansing, Michigan
• Real-Estate Terrorism in Jonathan Franzen's The Twenty-Seventh City
  November, 2004
  MMLA (Midwestern Modern Language Association), St. Louis, Missouri
• Racial Trespassing: Representations of Suburbia in Ann Petry's The Street
  March, 2004
  James F. Jakobsen Graduate Forum (University of Iowa), Iowa City, Iowa
• A Promissory Space: Jean Toomer's Cane and the "Soft Circle" of Aesthetics
  April, 2003
  Mid-America American Studies Association, Iowa City, Iowa
• The Woman With(out) a Past: Desiring Subjects and Objects of Desire in The House of Mirth
  March, 2001
  NEMLA, Hartford, Connecticut
• "I had two dreams": O'Neill and the Duality of Inwardness
  February, 2001
  Twentieth-Century Literature Conference, Louisville, Kentucky