I completed my doctorate in the Harvard English Department, where my research and teaching focus on Romantic poetry and prose, as well as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction. I am currently serving as a Lecturer in the English Department, where I am the Director of the Junior Tutorial Program and oversee 10-13 tutorials, I am also the Head Teaching Fellow for Humanities 10: A Humanities Colloquium, a "great books"-style course for 90 freshmen featuring 12 professors from across the humanities disciplines. Previously, I was the faculty co-convener of English 350: "Teaching and Professional Development Colloquium," a pedagogy seminar required of all third-year graduate students in the department. In 2017-18, I was the Departmental Pedagogy Fellow and Writing Fellow for English through the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning.
My dissertation, Cosmopolitan Romance: The Adventure of Archaeology, the Politics of Genre, and the Origins of the Future in Walter Scott’s Crusader Novels, examines the ways in which Romantic writers refashioned the genre of orientalist romance in an era of imperial expansion to rethink the problem of cultural origins as the foundation -- or, properly, the groundless ground of internal critique -- of the modern ideologies of nationalism, historicism, and political sovereignty. I am currently also at work on second project that will examine the intersection of war and ecology in the writing of natural history as science fiction in the long nineteenth century.
My areas of interest within and beyond the long eighteenth century include the historical novel; narrative poetry across all ages; the literature of Scotland and the Celtic periphery; orientalism and cosmopolitanism; genre, postcolonial, and queer theory; the philosophy of history, Marxism, and dialectical materialism; contemporary trends in ontology and speculative realism; and the history of literary criticism and theory of all varieties, the latter of which features prominently in all of my independent teaching.
At Harvard, I founded and coordinated for three years the English Department's Graduate Colloquium on the Long Eighteenth Century and Romanticism with the goal of fostering a vibrant dialogue in eighteenth-century and Romanticism studies within the university and greater Boston community. For more information, see the "Colloquium" section. I previously served as the Director of English 98r: The Junior Tutorial Program in 2016-17, as Lead Coordinator for the department's graduate colloquia, and co-coordinator of the Mahindra Humanities Center's Graduate Workshop on "The Humanities & Theory" (now called Dialectical Thinking in the Humanities).
Originally from New York, I graduated from Harvard College in 2004 and received a Master's degree from Oxford University in 2005. After earning an A.M. in English, I completed my Ph.D. at Harvard in 2015.
