about

I am an associate professor in the Department of English Literature and co-director of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College. I work on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and print culture, the history of the novel, twentieth-century Anglo-American literary criticism, and the history of higher education.

My new book The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study, co-authored with Laura Heffernan, shows how the core ideas and texts of  twentieth-century literary study have been made in classrooms at community colleges, HBCUs, public universities, and small liberal arts colleges – not at elite research universities. Recently Laura and I have written about T.S Eliot’s extension school teaching, Josephine Miles’s early distant reading, and how to resist polarizing stories about the past and future of higher education. I working on two other projects: a book on  how literary critics invented the Victorian novel’s form, and, with Laura Heffernan a book (and a course) on how theories of the novel help us understand social media.

Here is my cv. You can find more and more of my published work on my bepress SelectedWorks page. My ORCID ID is 0000-0003-1517-0195. My course materials often end up on Github. Sometimes I am on Twitter. Inadequately-tagged links pile up on my Pinboard.

I co-organize p19, a Philadelphia-area seminar in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Learn about us here.