Associate Professor
Department of English
Department of Comparative Literature
Faculty Director, Cultural Policy Center

Office: Rosenwald 426
Phone: (773) 702-3301
lary@uchicago.edu

My research focuses on the way in which literature, criticism, and other cultural activities participate in epistemic and political struggles. I am interested in understanding, in particular, how the nineteenth-century novel in England and France mutates in response to changes in what counts as knowledge (the emergence of physiology, statistics, economics, biology, linguistics, Darwinism); how cultural criticism carves out a niche for itself within the field of disciplines; and how fiction and criticism function as instruments of power. These concerns are reflected in my first book, Vital Signs, an analysis of the ways in which the realist imagination was shaped by the diagnostic techniques and professional tactics borrowed from clinical medicine. Since completing that relatively tightly focused project, I have broadened my scope to include a larger set of research questions about the utilities of culture. What is the history of efforts to mobilize culture for various ends? How has the "public good" aspect of the arts and humanities been conceived? If the cultural field can be understood as an economy, a market, or an ecological system, what norms govern its functioning, and what norms ought to do so? What good (or harm) does culture do? How has this impact been measured? How does the state regulate, exploit, promote or manage the arts and humanities so as to make them useful? How can we best understand the role played by intellectuals of various sorts in relationship to the state and public interests? These questions led me to found, in 1999, the Cultural Policy Center, which brings together faculty whose research--whether in economics, law, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, political science, public policy, history, art history, or cultural studies--touches on or could help inform policies (regarding copyright regimes, government funding, censorship, heritage preservation, etc.) affecting the arts and humanities. (See our website at http://culturalpolicy.uchicago.edu.)

As Faculty Director of the Center, I organized several major conferences, on topics ranging from the promise and perils of videogames to the preservationist controversies over the World Trade Center site and Soldier Field; from one of these conferences, on the battle that erupted over the Brooklyn Museum’s "Sensation" exhibition, I edited a collection of essays for a volume entitled Unsettling "Sensation." I also initiated a large-scale research project, working with sociologist Terry Clark, studying the impact of cultural scenes on urban development. A part of my teaching in recent years as been devoted to courses with a policy angle: I have taught an introduction to cultural policy studies, a course on culture in the marketplace, and, most recently, a course on the politics of taste. I continue, however, to teach courses on nineteenth-century European fiction.

Selected Publications:

Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. In the "Literature in History" series edited by David Bromwich, Lionel Gossman, and James Chandler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Book information at http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/5039.html "Victorian Medicine." In Blackwell Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Herbert F. Tucker (Boston: Blackwell, 1999). "Being There with Elaine Scarry," review of On Beauty and Being Just. In Minnesota Review, nos. 52-54 (Fall 2001): 309-314. "Cultural Policy Studies?? Cultural Policy Studies??? Cultural Policy Studies?!?? A Guide for Perplexed Humanists." This essay is available online at http://culturalpolicy.uchicago.edu. "The Interests in ‘Sensation.'" Introduction to Unsettling "Sensation": Arts Policy Lessons from the Brooklyn Museum of Art Controversy. Rutgers University Press, 2001. Rutgers Series on The Public Life of the Arts. The essay is available online at http://culturalpolicy.uchicago.edu/sensation.html.

Ph.D., Columbia University, 1986.  Teaching at Chicago since 1985.