Department of English

My main research interests focus on the literature and culture of Victorian Britain, as well as on modern American and British prose fiction more broadly. I also have research and teaching interests relating to print culture, media studies, contemporary fiction, pop/rock/punk music, literary theory, and animal studies. My first book, Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (Cambridge UP, 2005), aimed to complicate our thinking about Victorian literature's relationship to and representation of speech and orality by, for example, considering literary texts in relation to shorthand manuals, phonographs, and oral storytellers. My second monograph, Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel (Chicago UP, 2018) asks what it means to consider animals as members of a household or as characters in a novel. It considers animals as objects of sympathy and enmity, as companions and co-habitants, as subjects of experiment, as minor characters. My most recent book, A Visit From the Goon Squad Reread, one of the inaugural titles in Columbia University Press’s new Rereadings book series, shows how Jennifer Egan’s novel, and her work more broadly, blend a concern with the status of the novel in the twenty-first century with an elegiac meditation on how we experience the passage of time.

I have published scholarly articles in such journals as ELH, Victorian Studies, Victorian Review, Novel: a Forum on Fiction, and Studies in the Novel. I also have published widely on contemporary fiction, film, and pop music in Public Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Yorker online, The Chronicle of Higher Education, JSTOR Daily, The Point, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere.

I am also longtime co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Victorian Studies, and a founding member of the North American Victorian Studies Association. (I was in the room at the organization’s establishment in Bloomington, Indiana on July 5, 2002.)