In the recent special issue of Philip Roth Studies, I contributed a piece on redemption in Philip Roth's American Pastoral. Here is the abstract for the article: Critics often read American Pastoral as primarily concerning the American Dream, but one theme that is overlooked is redemption. Zuckerman admits that he was wrong about the Swede; to make it right, Zuckerman struggles to uncover the truth (detect) rather than making false assumptions. In doing so, he is also seeking redemption: both for the Swede, and for himself. I see this article as a sort of sequel to my article on The Human Stain: I hope to continue shifting the focus toward Zuckerman. The article can be found by clicking on the journal cover. 

The following is the MLA citation: Ozias, Joseph. "“Anything more . . . I’d have to make up”: From Assumption and Detection to the Language of Redemption in American Pastoral." Philip Roth Studies, vol. 21 no. 1, 2025, p. 3-16. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/prs.2025.a958774.

My JUR Emerging Writers Prize-winning peer-reviewed article, "'Bech lied:' The Un/Comfortable Idea of the Self in Updike's Bech: A Book," was just released in the latest issue of The John Updike Review. This article argues that Updike's Jewish American character, Henry Bech, is worth another look. He has been written off as a stereotype, an offensive character that exists only for Updike to poke fun at the literary cultural landscape, but I argue that there is more nuance here, that Updike's anxieties about biography and the pressure to write about himself manifest in Bech, and that Updike chose Bech's identity very carefully. Though published, the JUR website is currently under maintenance; if you wish to recieve a copy, please email me.

The following is the MLA citation: Ozias, Joseph. “‘Bech Lied:’ The Un/Comfortable Idea of the Self in John Updike’s Bech: 

A Book.” The John Updike Review, vol 11, no 2, 2024. 

In the Spring issue of Philip Roth Studies, roundtable panelists from ALA contribute extensions of their remarks from a recent roundtable in a special section devoted to Sabbath's Theater, celebrating the new Broadway stage adaptation. For my essay, I bring the topic of performativity; specifically, I discuss how post-COVID especially, the world shut down, and we turned inward. This could not last long, however, so everybody flocked to the internet to perform their despair, and they still do. Much of the type of humor found in this book (flippant discussion of suicide, despair, and depression) is generated on social media platforms like TikTok or Instagram. Social media in general is full of memes and jokes in which depression, despair, and even “the-desire-not-to-be-alive-any-longer” (203) are common threads, and it all feels as though Mickey Sabbath has leapt from the pages of this book and into everybody’s phones. The article can be found by clicking on the journal cover.

The following is the MLA citation: Ozias, Joseph. "“I say serious”: Joking about Suicide and Performative Self-Loathing in Sabbath’s Theater." Philip Roth Studies, vol. 21 no. 1, 2025, p. 98-105. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/prs.2025.a958781.

My peer-reviewed article, "As Good as Comedy Gold: Tracing Jewish Heritage and Humor in the Works of Joseph Heller" was published in Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS) in 2024. This article looks at Heller's career and tells a different story to the scholarly consensus. Heller is usually presented as a writer who could never capture the magic of his first novel, but in reality, the story is a much more complicated push and pull for Heller in terms of representing his Jewish identity. For more info, click on the journal cover. 

The following is the MLA citation: Ozias, Joseph. “As Good as Comedy Gold: Tracing Jewish Heritage and Humor in the Works of Joseph Heller.” MELUS, vol 49, no 2, 2024. doi: 10.1093/melus/mlae031.

My Siegel/McDaniel award-winning peer-reviewed article, titled "The Fragmented Mark: Zuckerman’s Characters as Self-Making in The Human Stain" was published in Philip Roth Studies in 2023. This article deals with Zuckerman's narration, and characters, as elements of a personal self-making that much of the scholarship on The Human Stain has yet to explicitly analyze. This argument relies on reading the characters as "parts of" Zuckerman, the narrator, himself, but also aspects of himself he has yet to realize. In a sense, the book is then Zuckerman writing into his own identity, rather than the identities of the other characters. The article can be found by clicking on the journal cover. 

The following is the MLA citation: Ozias, Joseph. "The Fragmented Mark: Zuckerman’s Characters as Self-Making in The Human Stain." Philip Roth Studies, vol. 19 no. 2, 2023, p. 58-73. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/prs.2023.a907260.

This is an article which was recently accepted for the forthcoming special issue of Women’s Writing titled “Unveiling Untold Narratives: Rediscovering the Literary Legacy of Jewish Female Writers and Representations of Jewish Women by Female Writers from the 1700s to the 1920s." The article explores two women whose lives are shaped by the Civil War (Emma Mordecai and Harriet Lane Levy) and puts their work, which exists at opposite sides of the war in terms of ideology and time, in conversation with each other for the first time. When the article is published, I will update this page with the link and MLA citation.

This is an article whose proposal was accepted for the forthcoming special issue of The Journal of Jewish Identities titled “Jews on the Small Screen(s)." While accepted, the article has still yet to be reviewed, a process which will begin in 2025. In the article, I explore how Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s 2019 novel Fleishman is in Trouble is, by design, a story about a man; but the twist is that it is not really that at all. While the novel appears to be about Toby Fleishman’s sexual escapades upon divorcing his wife, the novel becomes a meditation on what it means to be a woman in a world that prioritizes men like Toby. But, while the show tries to maintain an audience by hiding that which might not appeal to men, or even women, it wears its Jewishness on its sleeve—in the first few episodes they discuss bat mitzvahs, living in Israel, and Caplan’s character even asserts that she wants to “free [her]self from every Jewish girl cliché.” I analyze the way the TV show performs this sleight of hand differently from the novel and argue that the show’s overt Jewish identity informs this shift: for as Elizabeth hints, the Jewishness and the exploration of female identity are intertwined, even more so on the screen.