In an era of information overload, my cross-disciplinary research addresses the production of meaning---existential and semiotic---as well as how meaning fails.  I investigate broad questions of meaning-production across discursive genres, across disparate fields (literature, film, photography, anthropology, philosophy, psychoanalysis), across national divisions, and across traditional historical periods.  In research on poetry and poetics, I focus on the transformation---but also the persistence---of key verbal forms such as the sonnet from the sixteenth century to the present.  In research on human sexuality, I focus on stigmatized or minority sex practices, including subcultural formations, that depart from social norms.  Interested in popular culture and subcultural vernaculars (as well as high culture and literary language), I research pornography in addition to poetry (see Porn Archives).  The sexuality strand of my research includes 30+ years’ work on the history of pandemics, notably HIV/AIDS.  This range of foci requires a mixed-methods approach: ethnography, formalist analysis, close reading, continental and pragmatist philosophy, and post-Freudian psychoanalysis. More often than not, my publications foreground methodological issues and reflect explicitly on disciplinary norms. For work in psychoanalytic theory, I received a Distinguished Educator award from the International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education in 2022. My research program---which has yielded 7 books and more than 170 book chapters, peer-reviewed journal articles, and reviews---has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study, and humanities institutes at Stanford University, SUNY-Buffalo, and the University of Illinois, as well as by the James M. Benson Professorship.