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 (Bloomsbury, 2025), 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.
My work is animated by the question of how literary thinking might be made politically useful; my reckoning with that question has led me to conclude that literature can claim a political importance for itself only insofar as it also demonstrates a willingness to place the efficacy of its work under perpetual scrutiny. That is never an easy bargain to make, as many of the subjects of my work knew all too well.
I am currently working on my second book, which asks how Romantic poets, including William Wordsworth, 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. These questions, I claim, are as much about politics as they are about knowledge acquisition. For many eighteenth-century and Romantic poets, the rhetoric of pedagogy provided a venue for fleshing out various models of social organization, ranging in type from conservative to progressive and comprising all sorts of models in between. 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. Whether poetry’s aesthetic education also constitutes a sufficiently political education is one of the key concerns of my project. The Romantics, I claim, had some surprising answers.
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 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025). 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.