I am Associate Professor of English at Tulane University, where I am also affiliated faculty in the Stone Center for Latin American Studies, the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Program in Film Studies. I work in Anglo-American and European literature and film of the 20th-21st centuries with a focus on modernism, its continued resonance in recent global fiction and cinema, and the relationship between philosophy and literature. 

My most recent book, A Different Order of Difficulty: Literature After Wittgenstein (University of Chicago Press, 2020) attends to the significance of Wittgenstein's philosophy for studies in literary modernism and its afterlife in contemporary literature. In it, I show that reading a key works of 20th-century literature after Wittgenstein—in light of his contemporaneous writing, and in the wake of recent scholarly thinking about his philosophy—allows for a deeper understanding of the interwoven commitments related to the concerns with difficulty, oblique ethical instruction, and a yearning for transformation that I argue lie at the core of both Wittgenstein’s philosophical method and literary modernism. These three central concerns also go on to shape modernism’s afterlife in contemporary fiction. 

I am currently working on a new book called Vanity., and on another project on Grace and Disgrace. I am also co-editor, with Michael LeMahieu, of Wittgenstein and Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 2017) and, with R. Lanier Anderson of The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, in progress for 2022),

My teaching and research interests include: transatlantic and European modernism, contemporary literature; the novel; the foundations of Analytic philosophy; Continental philosophy; faith and secularity; difficulty; comedy and ethics; experimental fiction; critical theory, and film studies.

Before coming to Tulane, I was a fellow in Comparative Literature at Harvard, and in English at Stanford as a member of the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities. I have also taught in Comparatve Literature at the University of California, Berkeley (where I earned my PhD), and in the Departments of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Virginia while a graduate student in philosophy there. 

My recent teaching includes seminars on "Transatlantic Modernism", "Living in the Questions," "Literary Transformation," "Novels of Thinking," "James Joyce's Ulysses," "Kafka, Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality," "The Moment in Modernism," "From Weimar to Film Noir," "Modernism's Global Afterlife" "The Booker Prize: Aesthetics, Commerce and Canon-Making," "Virginia Woolf and Modernism," "The Modernist Story, the Millennial Film," "Novels of Thinking" and lecture courses on 19th and 20th-century British and Irish Literature. Courses for 2017-2021 include "Solitude Surrounded," "Uncertainty," "Spiky Women," "The Meaning of Life," "Modernism's Afterlife: Teaching and Transformation," "21st Century Selves: Descriptions of a Struggle," "Grace and Disgrace," a seminar on Toni Morrison and a course on the Very Contemporary Novel.