Bio

I am a faculty member in the Harvard Writing Program and the Writing Director for Humanities 10: A Humanities Colloquium. My current writing course, "Signs of the Times," explores the concept of “time” from three broad perspectives: from the way we use storytelling to give meaning to sequences of events, to the way we think about the past’s relationship to the present, and, finally, the ways we try (and fail) to maximize our time, or to cheat it. I also teach a course called "Truth Claims in a Post-Truth World," which considers the relationship between truth and fiction, the value of expertise and anecdotal evidence, and the anatomy of the conspiracy theory.

My own research focuses primarily on Romantic and Victorian literature and culture. My current project, "Narrative Lives, Lyric Selves: Autobiography and Poetic Form,” explores the role that the autobiographical mode plays in determining, or undermining, the distinctions we draw between lyric and narrative forms from Milton's Paradise Lost to the Victorian dramatic monologue. My recent work has appeared in Essays in Criticism, The European Romantic ReviewRomanticism, and The Wordsworth Circle

I hold a PhD in English Literature from Harvard and a masters degree in Romantic and Victorian Literature from the University of Oxford, where I studied as a Clarendon Scholar. I received a BA in English and Theater Arts from Brandeis University. At Harvard, I have coordinated the Long Eighteenth-Century and Romanticism Colloquium and taught British and American poetry from the 17th century to the present, children's and adolescent literature, narrative theory, the history of reading, and an interdisciplinary course on character archetypes. As the Pedagogy Fellow in English, I co-led (with Professor Marjorie Garber) the department's Teaching Seminar for new graduate student teachers.