American Literature from around 1830 to the present, Pragmatism, Aesthetics, Philosophy and Literature, Critical Methods
My research ranges over U.S. literature and philosophy of the past two hundred years, usually with an emphasis on aesthetic experience: what it is, how it works, when and where it happens. Recently, I’ve pursued these questions with an eye towards aesthetic education and have co-edited three journal special issues that approach that subject from different angles: pedagogy (“Aesthetic Education: A Twenty-First-Century Primer,” with Kate Stanley, PMLA 2023), criticism (“Understanding Criticism,” with Emily Ogden, New Literary History 2024), and philosophy (“Reimagining Aesthetic Education,” with Patrick Hayes, Genre 2027).
My current project, “Intensity and the Feeling of Life,” elaborates the history and meaning of a fundamental aesthetic category of modernity: intensity. Starting with Edgar Allan Poe and moving up to present, I track the emergence of intensity as an aesthetic ideal and follow both its shifting fortunes (sometimes praised, sometimes denounced) and the literary styles designed to incite it. Throughout, I argue that for two centuries the category of aesthetic intensity has been a privileged site for articulating the complicated relation between art and life.
My first book, Chromographia, looks at the ways that U.S. writers imagined color experience between 1880 and 1930. It reads a diverse array of writers - from Stephen Crane and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to L. Frank Baum and Nella Larsen - in light of the material history of chromatic technologies and all the things that bright color came to stand for at the turn of the twentieth century: commodity culture, “civilization,” racialized sensation, avant-gardism, the perceptual lives of small children, and much else besides.
I also have an abiding interest in American pragmatism, both as a historical phenomenon and as a resource for thinking about literature and criticism. One branch of this research has focused on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, not a pragmatist per se but an important figure in the reception and reinvention of pragmatism over the past several decades. Other strands include essays on aesthetic experience and attention, the idea of aesthetic form (as opposed to other types of form), the cognitive work involved in the creation and reception of literary texts, and the relation between aesthetic artifice and the “sense of reality.” This last topic led me to write about the literary and critical hand-wringing around the relation between facts and fictions sparked by Trump’s first election, in “Reality in America, Redux: On Trump Panic Fiction” (American Literary History 2024).
Undergraduate: Nineteenth century to the present day, American Literature
Postgraduate: American Literature since around 1880, Philosophy and Literature, Critical Methods
I would be delighted to hear from potential applicants wanting to work on aspects of twentieth-century American literature or on questions of method, aesthetics, or the relation between literature and philosophy.
Before coming to Oxford, I taught in the English Department at Rutgers University and, before that, in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago. I received my PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010, and my BA in English from Birmingham-Southern College in 2003. In 2014-15, I was a Mellon fellow at the Penn Humanities Forum.
