My research focuses on how Christian narratives, images and practices support and subvert identity and desire, especially as they interact with contemporary cultural artifacts and discourses.  Specifically, I am interested in how gendered and sexual identities are generated, shaped and disrupted through and in resistance to Christianity.  In pursuing this question, I rely primarily on insights gained from the work of Georges Bataille, queer theory, psychoanalysis and poststructuralist literary theory.  In Ecce Homo, I consider constructions of masculine subjectivity and the evocation of homoerotic desire in relation to representations of the male-body-in-pain, including psychoanalytic discourses, images of crucifixion, paintings by Francis Bacon, photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and films from the Hollywood action genre.  In Sacrificing Ethics, I hope to extend my interest in both Bataille and queer theory by staging a conversation among Bataille, Leo Bersani, Teresa de Lauretis, Tim Dean, Lee Edelman and Judith Halberstam.  I am particularly interested in exploring the kinds of ethical frameworks and political analyses that might be generated starting from negativity, self-annihilation and the death drive.  In Formalizing Desire, I will explore these same questions from the vantage point of mystical and pornographic writing, their shared stylistic and formal features, and their capacity to disrupt the reader’s sense of a stable, coherent self.  These questions will be pursued through comparative analyses of the Marquis de Sade and Hadewijch of Antwerp, Georges Bataille and Angela of Foligno, Jean Genet and Thérèse of Lisieux, and Dennis Cooper and Pseudo-Dionysius.  Finally, with Negative Ecstasies, co-edited with Jeremy Biles, I seek to show the generativity and importance of Georges Bataille’s ideas for the academic study of religion.