English

EDUCATION:
B.A., English, McGill University, 1990
A.M., Comparative Literature, Stanford University, 1991
Ph.D., Comparative Literature, Stanford University, 1997

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INTERESTS: Modernism; the novel; intellectual history; literary theory.

My concern in my research and teaching is to show how developments in literary form emerge out of a background of social, political, and existential ferment. For example, rather than understand the modernists as elitists, hermetically sealed off from the broader culture, I explore their engagements with that culture and the distinctively literary solutions that they found for the central problems of their time. Each of my books explores the development of modern literary forms in a period of political and social instability. My teaching interests include the novel, modernism in literature and the arts, the epic tradition from Homer to Joyce, English poetry from Chaucer to T. S. Eliot, literature and philosophy, and literary theory.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

--Religious Experience in the Modernist Novel: God’s Afterlife from Henry James to Virginia Woolf. Work in progress.

--The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism. Cambridge University Press, 2007.

--Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel. Cambridge University Press, 2000.

--“The Reality of the Unseen: Shared fictions and religious experience in the ghost stories of Henry James.” Arizona Quarterly 61.2 (Summer 2005): 33-66.

--“Churchgoing in the Modern Novel.” Modernism/Modernity 11 (2004): 667-94.

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES: Modernism in Literature and the Arts, Introduction to Narrative, Major English Poets: Chaucer to T. S. Eliot, The European Tradition: Epic and Novel, Introduction to the Theory of Literature, Modern British Novel, Modern European Novel

GRADUATE COURSES: Modernist Fiction: The Seen and the Unseen, Psychoanalysis and Literature, Moderns, 1914-1926