Jeff Allred graduated from Williams College in 1995 and has been at Penn since 1998. His dissertation, "Developing Nation(s): Articulations of America in Word and Image," examines a range of texts from the 1930s that combine words and images in a documentary mode and argues that these texts engage central political problems of the era: the relationships between intellectual elites and masses; the unevenness of economic and cultural development; and the relationship between national identity and other collective identities based in class, race, etc. His academic and teaching interests include: American studies, modernism, visual culture, critical theory, and African-American literature.