English

EDUCATION:
Ph.D., English and American Literature and Language, Harvard University, 2007
(pending)
B.A., English, Rice University, 1998

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INTERESTS: Poetry in English; 19th and 20th century literature; aesthetics and 
style; philosophy
My research and teaching focus on poetry in English, with special emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries.  I am interested in aesthetic issues of form and style, and also in the ways literature interacts with intellectual culture (responding to and shaping developments in philosophy and science, for example).  In my current project, The Feeling of Knowing, I look at how modern poets describe powerful experiences of belief in a time when much of the traditional language for such experiences has been drained away with the loss of a shared religious culture.  My next project will be a study of poetry and sound: I will be looking at how (and to what aesthetic ends) poets use the stylistic features of a written medium to suggest the aural properties of sound and speech.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

--"Thomas Hardy and the Impersonal Lyric," The Journal of Modern Literature, Summer, 2007.
--"Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Kinesthetics of Conviction" (journal article forthcoming)

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES: Major English Poets, Post-Religious Poetry