Associate Professor; Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University
Research Interests:
18th and 19th Century American literature; literary theory; aesthetics
Selected Publications:
“Opening Up Close Reading: Melville and Decorative Aesthetics,” in Melville and Aesthetics, ed. Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
“Harriet Jacobs’s ‘Excrescences’: Aesthetics and Politics in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” Theory & Event 13: 4 (2010): n.p.
“‘Just Apply a Weight’: Thoreau and the Aesthetics of Ornament,” ELH 77 (Fall 2010): 561-87.
Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
“‘Out of the Medium in Which Books Breathe’: Tactile Abstraction in The Golden Bowl,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 34:3 (Summer 2001): 411-33.