English

EDUCATION:
Ph.D. (English), Brown University, 1978
B.A. (Literature), Wheaton College, summa cum laude, 1969

Printable C.V.

INTERESTS:Victorian poetry and prose; life writing, especially autobiography; nature and travel writing; the history of authorship; 19 th-century periodicals and print culture
My research and teaching focus on 19 th-century British literature, including poetry, nature writing, and auto/biography. I publish regularly on life writing and have written Victorian Autobiography: The Tradition of Self-Interpretation and Traditions of Women's Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing. My current projects include a study of 19th-century women of letters, articles on The Life of Charlotte Brontë, and a work-in-progress on the debut poetry volumes of  A.C. Swinburne, Alice Meynell, Oscar Wilde, and Thomas Hardy. I edit the Norton Reader, a collection of classic and contemporary essays, and frequently teach an upper-level writing course, "Daily Themes," which has been a part of the English department's curriculum since 1907.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

--The Autobiography of Harriet Martineau, with introduction, annotations, and historical appendices.  Petersborough: Broadview Press, 2007.

--The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell, editor. In The Complete Works of Elizabeth Gaskell. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006

--Traditions of Victorian Women's Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing. Charlottesville : University Press of Virginia, 1999, 2001

--"Alice Meynell’s Preludes (1875): Preludes to What Future of Poetry?” Victorian Literature and Culture, 34 (2006), 405-26

--"From French Revolution to English Reform: Hannah More, Harriet Martineau, and the ‘Little Book,’” Nineteenth Century Literature, 60 (2006), 409-50

--"Charlotte Riddell’s A Struggle for Fame: Myths of Authorship, Facts of the Market,” Women’s Writing 11 (2004), 99-115

--"Collaborative Life Writing as Ideology: The Auto/biographies of Mary Howitt and Her Family,” Prose Studies 26 (2003), 176-95 [click here to view essay in pdf]

--"Domestic and Idyllic Poetry.” In A Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Richard Cronin et al. Oxford: Blackwells, 2002. Pp. 42-58

--"The Feminist Origins of Ruskin’s ‘Of Queens’ Gardens.’” In Ruskin and Gender, ed. Dinah Birch and Francis O’Gorman. London: Palgrave Press, 2002. Pp. 86-106

--"Margaret Oliphant's Autobiography as Professional Artist's Life.” Women's Writing 6 (1999), 261-77

--"Sappho and the Making of Tennysonian Lyric,” ELH 61 (1994), 121-37

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES: The Modern Essay, Major English Poets, Nature Writing in Britain and the Colonies, The English Bildungsroman, and Daily Themes

GRADUATE COURSES: Victorian Poetry, Nineteenth-Century Women Authors, and Late Victorian