Jay Ellis grew up in Mesquite, Texas, playing drums at stock shows, shopping malls, and VFW halls. Professor Ellis earned his B.A. from the Berklee College of Music, an M.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature at the University of Texas at Dallas, and a Ph.D. in American Literature at NYU. Publications include No Place for Home: Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy (Routledge), which received an Eaton Faculty Award from CU’s Center for Humanities and the Arts.
Current projects include a second novel as well as interdisciplinary scholarship on the spaces of novels, film, and culture, particularly in intersections of history, imagination, gender, and figurations of domesticity in putatively masculinist narratives. Professor Ellis teaches in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric, including an upper-division writing course cross-listed with the Center that informs his new book, Don’t Fence Me In: Spatial Ambivalence in American Literature and Culture.