I specialize in eighteenth-century and Romantic British literature, and I have taught a range of courses, including on the long eighteenth century, Romanticism, the early modern period, the medieval period, the history of the novel, Milton, and Shakespeare. I am the author of Melancholic Life: Literary Expression and the Experience of History from Burton to Keats (forthcoming from Bloomsbury), which argues that the eighteenth century constitutes a pivotal historical moment for our understanding of the kinds of political possibilities that might or might not follow from the lived experience of melancholic feeling.
I am currently working on a project that asks how Romantic poets (from William Wordsworth to John Keats and others) thought about the topic of pedagogy—what kinds of things one ought to learn from one’s teachers; what kinds of things cannot be learned from teachers; who the best (or worst) teachers are; whether one ought to learn about the world from books, from school, or from some other source; and whether academic knowledge has (or ought to have) any practical utility. At the core of this project is the question of how—or even whether—one ought to value the kind of aesthetic education that poetry in particular provides, for depending on who one asks, poetry might be said to be either the best or worst teacher that one could ask for, either the best or worst medium for communicating academic knowledge (or any other kind of knowledge, for that matter). That question will sound familiar to many of us working in the humanities today. The Romantics had some surprising answers, and my own account will suggest that, if we want to grapple with that question, as well as with the others that follow from it, we might have to re-reckon, if only in the most ambivalent sense imaginable, with the strange pedagogical work performed by the practice of rhetorical reading—a methodology whose supposed obsolescence might be what makes it worthy of our attention.
Education:
PhD, English, University of Maryland (2016)
MA, English, Clemson University (2009)
BA, English, Miami University (2007)
Selected publications:
Book:
Melancholic Life: Literary Expression and the Experience of History from Burton to Keats (forthcoming, Bloomsbury Academic). https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/melancholic-life-9798765127308/.
Articles:
“Melancholy’s Ends: Thomson’s Reveries.” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 64.1 (2022): 53-76. http://doi.org/10.1353/crt.2022.0002.
“Thomas Gray’s Elegy and the Politics of Memorialization.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 58.3 (2018): 653-72. http://doi.org/10.1353/sel.2018.0026.
“Deathly Sentimentalism: Sarah Fielding, Henry Mackenzie.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 30.2 (2018): 175-93. http://doi.org/10.3138/ecf.30.2.175.
“Happy Violence: Bentley, Lucretius, and the Prehistory of Freethinking.” Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700 38.1 (2014): 61-80. http://doi.org/10.1353/rst.2014.0008.