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 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 have appeared in ELH and New Literary History, where I received the 2019 Ralph Cohen Prize for my article linking Gerard Manley Hopkins, Franz Brentano, and the founding of the British journal Mind. I am currently coediting a book with Marion Thain entitled Mind and Embodiment in Late Victorian Literature and developing a chapter on close reading and hermeneutics for an anthology on attention studies.
My broader research and teaching interests lie in poetry and poetics, fin-de-siècle science and culture, the birth of the “human sciences,” and intersections between Anglo-American and continental literature and philosophy. No one 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. Classes I have taught have included the Global Nineteenth Century, Literature and Psychology, The Literature of the Fin de Siècle, and The Self and Lyric Form. In addition, I am interested in modern Hungarian literature and translation and am developing a project on literary critiques of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
Refereed Articles
“‘The Keener Touch’: Walter Pater and the Hermeneutic Scene of Contact.” ELH, vol. 89, no. 1, Spring 2022, pp. 185-213.
“The Grammar of Instress: Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Philosophers of Mind.” New Literary History, vol. 50, no. 3, Summer 2020, pp. 501-522.
“Can the Vampire Speak? Dracula as Discourse on Cultural Extinction.” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, vol. 56, no. 2, 2013, pp. 231-245.
Edited Volumes
Mind and Embodiment in Late Victorian Literature, co-edited with Marion Thain, Edinburgh University Press (forthcoming, 2024).
Invited Chapters
“Hermeneutics, Close Reading, and Attention,” Close Reading as Attentional Practice, ed. Marion Thain and Ewan Jones, Edinburgh University Press (forthcoming, 2024).
Translations
Poems by Miklós Radnóti. Metamorphoses: A Journal of Literary Translation, vol. 11, no. 2, 2013, pp. 120-123.