Dr. Conn specializes in twentieth century African-American and American literature. His secondary interests include the intellectuals of the African diaspora, critical theory, and psychoanalysis, especially object relations theory. He is currently working on a book project that explores issues of interracial social relations and intersubjective psychical relations in late modernist African-American and white American fiction. Conn's writing on James Baldwin's Another Country has won essay prizes from the Northeast Modern Language Association's LGBTQ caucus and from the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center. He has taught courses on the depiction of trauma and melancholia in African-American and American Indian fiction, the intersection of existential philosophy and African diaspora literature, and the figure of the robot in international literature and cinema. Before coming to UNT, Conn was a lecturer in the English department at Case Western Reserve University. He is also an experienced teacher of composition, having taught college writing at Johns Hopkins, Case, and now UNT.