Department of English

About

My broad area of study is the British nineteenth century, where I specialize in the theory and history of the novel. Particular interests include moral philosophy, theories of sympathy and of realism, and narrative theory, but I teach a variety of subjects and approaches. My first book, Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Johns Hopkins 2012), considers nineteenth-century fiction in relation to Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments to argue for the development of a literary realism for which sympathetic protocols are necessary for confirming and maintaining social reality. My book in progress, Stupidity after Enlightenment, is a study of stupidity's value for scientists and artists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I am co-editor of the journal Victorian Studies.

View the Victorian Studies Program website

View recent article and book chapters