Biography
I study the literary history of the long nineteenth century. My work examines how US writers and readers thought about education's role in democracy during that period. I'm especially interested in practices of self-culture around the turn of the twentieth century; more broadly, I'm interested in the history of higher education and the history of reading.
My current book project, "Hard Reading," investigates the making and early reception of the Harvard Classics. I'm also co-editing a volume of Henry James's early short stories for the Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James. My first book, American Snobs: Transatlantic Novelists, Liberal Culture, and the Genteel Tradition, shows how Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Henry Adams criticized liberal arguments for democracy and the expansion of access to culture.
My scholarship on educational thought directly informs my teaching practice. At Chicago, I teach courses on nineteenth-century literature, Humanities Core seminars, and foundational courses for the English major. Previously, I've taught a wide range of literary subjects as well as first-year college writing. I enjoy experimenting with new pedagogies and rethinking humanities instruction for our moment.
Before coming to Chicago, I taught at the University of Bristol in the UK, where I joined the English faculty after holding postdoctoral teaching positions at Princeton and Oxford.
Selected Publications
"What Makes a (Harvard) Classic? Filling Dr Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf in 1909." New American Studies Journal 76 (February 2025).
"The Man of Letters: Professor Barrett Wendell and the Style of White Supremacy." College Literature Special Issue: "American Literary Institutions around 1900," edited by Sheila Liming, Florian Sedlmeier, and Alexander Starre. 51.4 (Fall 2024): 502-531.
"Reading and Attention in Wharton's Modernity and Our Own." Edith Wharton Review 40.1 (2024).
"Ozick's Feminism and the Woman Writer." Studies in American Jewish Literature Special Issue: "Cynthia Ozick and the Art of Nonfiction," edited by Michèle Mendelssohn and Charlie Tyson. 43.1 (2024): 59-75.
American Snobs: Transatlantic Novelists, Liberal Culture, and the Genteel Tradition. Edinburgh University Press, 2021.
"Edith Wharton's Microscopist and the Science of Language." The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, edited by Ahuja et al., 163-179. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
"American Nervousness: Motherhood and the 'Mental Activity of Women' in the Era of Sexual Anarchy." In Edinburgh Companion to Fin-de-Siècle Literature, Culture and the Arts, edited by Josephine Guy, 361-380. Edinburgh University Press, 2018.
"'A Roaring and Discontinuous Universe': Edith Wharton's Modern Hauntings." In The Routledge Companion to the Ghost Story, edited by Luke Thurston & Scott Brewer, 159-167. London: Routledge, 2018.
"Mary Augusta Ward's 'Perfect Economist' and the Logic of Anti-Suffragism." ELH 82 (Winter 2015): 1213-1238.
"Henry James's Dramas of Cultivation: Liberalism and Democracy in The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima." Henry James Review 36 (Summer 2015): 177-198.
"'This Immense Expense of Art': George Eliot and John Ruskin on Consumption and the Limits of Sympathy." Nineteenth-Century Literature 65 (September 2010): 214-245.
Teaching
Undergraduate:
Democracy and the School: Writing about Education
Fiction
Pleasure Reading
Reading Nineteenth-Century Feminisms
Graduate:
American Fiction of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
James Beyond the Novel
Ways of Reading in the Long Nineteenth Century
Writing in the Humanities