About
I’m thrilled to announce that my monograph
Airpower in Literature: Interrogating the Clean War, 1915-2015 was released this week at Lexington Books. The category is literary criticism, and it is available as a hardback or ebook at any of the major online booksellers–or you can order it at your local indie bookstore. For a 30% discount, use promo code LXFANDF30 at the link above.
My writing and research examine the representation of airpower and the human costs of airpower employment in twentieth and twenty-first century literature. My interests blend my first career as a USAF Officer and aviator with my newest career teaching and writing about literature. After twenty-two years as a KC-135 navigator, conducting in-flight refueling with other aircraft and flying combat missions over Afghanistan, I returned to my first love, literature.
I’m currently in transition, after teaching literature and writing for fifteen years at four colleges and universities. I most recently taught American and multi-ethnic literature at Granite State College, NH, but now will focus on promoting my forthcoming book. Previously, I taught at University of New Hampshire (TA), Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (Worldwide Campus) and University of Phoenix.
In addition to teaching, I co-facilitated two sessions of “From Troy to Baghdad: Dialogues on the Experience of War and Homecoming” for the New Hampshire Humanities. In this group, veterans and their families read and discussed Homer’s
The Odyssey as a springboard to discover their own truths about combat trauma, personal sacrifice, and readjustment.
Education
Ph.D. English, University of New Hampshire
M.A. English, The College of New Jersey
M.S. Administration, Central Michigan University
B.A. English, Concordia College (NY) Work Shared in CORE
Articles
Projects
Here’s an overview of my monograph Airpower in Literature: Interrogating the Clean War, 1915-2015, just released at Lexington Books:
The first century of airpower has ended, yet few critics have addressed the literature that chronicles its human toll. Airpower in Literature: Interrogating the Clean War, 1915-2015 offers fresh insight into this airpower century by placing literature of five major wars in conversation with the clean war discourse. Kimberly Dougherty examines the paradoxical representation of aerial warfare that has allowed extensive airstrikes on cities and civilians while promising a “cleaner” method of waging war. First suggested by early military theorists, the notion of a clean air war—one that would save lives through its speed and precision— proved seductive in the twentieth century and continues to shape the rhetoric of airpower today. The air war is perceived as clean, the author argues, when we see neither the aviator nor the targeted populations in the bombing dynamic. Through analysis of fiction, poetry, drama, and journalism, from the ruins of World War I to the technologies of post-modern war, the author identifies counternarratives that make visible both aviators and bombed societies, and present aerial warfare that is not clean, but messy, prolonged, and imprecise. This exploration encourages readers, and writers, to approach the next century of airpower with greater wisdom and empathy. Upcoming Talks and Conferences
Keynote Speaker
University of New Hampshire
Mar 2020
Presented “Women in the Military: Obstacles Overcome, Contemporary Stories, Vision for the Future” at Women and the Military Luncheon, UNH Military and Veteran Services Center.
Recent conference presentation:
Oct 2018: “The Clean War: A Century of Writing about Airpower” at University of Leicester’s Symposium North American Literature and Culture in the Twentieth Century.
Memberships
NCTE
AAUW
Women Military Aviators (WMA)
