English

EDUCATION:
Ph.D., Columbia University, 1998
M.S., School of Journalism, Columbia University, 1987
B.A., Columbia University, 1985

Printable C.V.

INTERESTS: 19th-century British fiction, British modernism, contemporary Indian fiction, the literature of friendship, book and arts criticism

My current project is Friendship: A Cultural History from Jane Austen to Jennifer Aniston . The book draws on fiction, film, television, poetry, and other arts, as well as on insights from the social sciences, to trace the impact of modernity on the ways that friendship has been imagined and practiced in Great Britain and the United States over the past two centuries. As someone who believes that it is important for academics to communicate with society at large , I also contribute to the New York Times Book Review, The Nation, and the American Scholar and have written dance criticism for the Financial Times and the Village Voice.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

--Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets ( New York: Columbia UP, 2004)

--"Thomas Hardy and the Culture of Friendship," forthcoming in Wordsworth Circle 37 ( Winter 2006)

--"Conrad’s Impasse: The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ and the Invention of Marlow," forthcoming in Conradiana 38 (Fall 2006)

--"Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Transformation of Community," Raritan 20 (Fall 2000)

--"Heroism and Humanity in the Case of Lydgate," SEL 38 (Autumn 1998)

--"Community and Cognition in Pride and Prejudice," ELH 64 (Summer 1997)

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES: The European Literary Tradition, Major English Poets, Modern Prose: Advanced Writing, Jane Austen, British Fiction in the Age of Conrad, Modern British Novel, Contemporary South Asian Fiction, The Literature of Friendship, Daily Themes

GRADUATE COURSES: British Fiction, 1890-1915