I joined the English Department in 2022 after receiving my PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley and my BA in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. My research focuses on the literature, science, and philosophy of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My current project sets forth a new account of British aestheticism in the context of early phenomenology, Victorian philosophy, and the birth of psychology as an independent discipline. Parts of this project appear in ELH and New Literary History. I recently coedited a volume with Marion Thain entitled Mind and Embodiment in Late Victorian Literature and contributed a chapter on close reading and hermeneutics for an anthology on attention studies.
My broader research and teaching interests include in fin-de-siècle science and culture; theories of the lyric and historical poetics; the birth of the “human sciences”; intersections between Anglo-American and continental literature and philosophy; and the history of psychology. No single language or cultural tradition captures the complex web of new developments in the arts and sciences that characterizes the period I research, so I always try to think and teach globally. Courses I have taught include The Global Nineteenth Century, Literature and Psychology, Poetry and Poetics, and Affect Theory. In addition, I am interested in modern Hungarian literature and translation and in literary critiques of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
Refereed Articles
“‘The Keener Touch’: Walter Pater and the Hermeneutic Scene of Contact.” ELH 89, no. 1 (2022): 185-213.
“The Grammar of Instress: Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Philosophers of Mind.” New Literary History 50, no. 3 (2020): 501-522.
“Can the Vampire Speak? Dracula as Discourse on Cultural Extinction.” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 56, no. 2 (2013): 231-245.
Edited Volumes
Mind and Embodiment in Late Victorian Literature, co-edited with Marion Thain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025).
Book Chapters
“Close Reading and the Hermeneutic Circle of Attention” in Close Reading as Attentional Practice, eds. Marion Thain and Ewan Jones (Edinburgh University Press – forthcoming).
“Materiality, Form, and Style in Walter Pater” in The Palgrave Handbook of Phenomenology and Literature (Palgrave Macmillan – forthcoming).
Translations
Poems by Miklós Radnóti, Metamorphoses: A Journal of Literary Translation 11, no. 2 (2013): 120-123.