English

EDUCATION:
Ph.D., English Language and Literature, Yale University, 2001
M. Phil., English Romantic Studies, Oxford University, 1996
B.A., summa cum laude, English and Philosophy Major, Yale University, 1994.

Printable C.V.

INTERESTS: I research and teach English literature of the long Nineteenth Century: both Romantic and Victorian, both poetry and the novel. Other areas of interest include German Classical Literature (especially Goethe and Schiller) and Aesthetic Theory.

My first book demonstrated the scope of my interests by considering the treatment of literary and political action in writers from Wordsworth to Henry James. While my current project, on the Victorian response to an unpopular war (the Crimean War, 1854-56), is narrower, it allows me to think further about the impact of social and political matters on formal ones: how (for example) does patriotic poetry translate the blunders of the Crimea into verse? I am especially fascinated by how literature—whether the clear prose of Austen or the frills and trills of Tennysonian verse—does such cultural work.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

--The Crisis of Action in English Nineteenth-Century Literature, December 2006

--“North and South, East and West: Gaskell, The Crimean War, and the Condition of England.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, June 2005

--“George Eliot’s Problem With Action.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 (SEL), Autumn 2001

--“Arthur Hugh Clough, Amours de Voyage, and the Victorian Crisis of Action.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, March 2001

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES: Writing About Literature I, Major English Poets, European Literary Tradition, Jane Austen (Junior seminar), The Romantic Novel (Junior seminar), The Victorian Novel (lecture)

GRADUATE COURSE: Nineteenth-Century Long Narrative Poetry (Sp 2007)