Professor

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Although I started out as a modernist interested in Irish and British fiction and poetry, 1890-1945, long ago I stumbled backwards and blindfolded into the nineteenth century, to explore literary modernism’s origins. Then I staggered forward to Beckett and beyond, to trace modernism’s aftermath. The temporal expansion reflects my passionate engagement with particular authors (including Mary Shelley, Hardy, Stoker, Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Beckett, Angela Carter, Octavia Butler, and Alison Bechdel) informed by my attention to style and its conceptual implications. In mid-career, I taught modern intellectual history in an interdisciplinary program. I now teach and write about post-Romantic literature, all the genres, especially works of the long twentieth century (1885-present) on both sides of the Atlantic, but also about the Gothic (Ann Radcliffe to contemporary sci-fi). I teach as well humanistic theory and literary criticism, with emphases on modernity, creativity, aesthetic response, narrative, post-colonialism, sexuality, and anthropological issues (environmental humanities; animal studies).

My overlapping long-term primary scholarly projects are: Modernist Gothic: Wilde to Beckett and Wild(e) Modernism: The Masking of a Precursor. I have recently published second editions of two modernist narratives with extensive supplementary material: a revised Norton Critical Edition of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist (2022) and a revised  Dracula (Bedford/Macmillan, 2016). I have a pedagogical essay in press on Dracula in the modern literature classroom with an emphasis on female agency and a substantially refocused essay on Joyce before Ulysses for the new Cambridge Companion to James Joyce. My graduate seminars in the past fifteen years have concerned James Joyce, Literature & Laughter, Modernist Authenticity, 19th-century Gothic, and modernist Gothic. I’m contemplating one on the modernist Bildungsroman. My advanced undergrad courses (some open to graduate enrollments) concern modern literature (Modern Irish Writers; Joyce & After—a multi-generic course in transatlantic modernism from Ulysses through Fun Home; Gothic [Theory & Methods]). I teach an undergrad introductory course on Modern Lives—Turning Points. My professional commitments off campus include co-chairing the Modernism Seminar at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center.

 

 

Selected Publications

  • Norton Critical Ed. of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (2022; 2007)
  • Bedford/St. Martin’s Case Studies Editions: Dracula (2016; 2002); Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1998)
  • Guest editing: Modern Fiction Studies (2013, 2000), New Literary History (2000), & Modernism/Modernity (2005)
  • Edited essay collections: T.S. Eliot: Critical Insights (2010); Gothic & Modernism: Essaying Dark Literary Modernity (2008); Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation by Fritz Senn (1984).
  • Harmony of Dissonances: T.S. Eliot, Romanticism, and Imagination (1991).
  • Teller and Tale in Joyce’s Fiction: Oscillating Perspectives (1983)
  • “Dawn in a Modern Literature Course,” Approaches to Teaching Octavia Butler (2019)
  • “Gothic Revivals: The Fin de Siècle, Irish Modernism, and the Heritage of Wilde and Stoker,” The Cambridge History of Irish Modernism (2019)
  • “Modernist American Gothic,” The Cambridge Companion to American Gothic (2017)
  • “Modernist Gothic,” Cambridge Companion to Modern Gothic (2014)
  • “Staging the Modernist Monologue as Capable Negativity: Beckett Between & Beyond Eliot & Joyce” (2014)
  • “Modernist Transformations of Life Narrative: From Wilde and Woolf to Bechdel and Rushdie,” Modern Fiction Studies (2013)
  • “Oscar Wilde’s Anadoodlegram: A Speculative, Genetic Reading of An Ideal Husband,” The Wilde Archive (2013)

Work in Progress

  • Essays on: A Portrait of the Artist as recursive narrative of emergence rather than development; Dracula in the modern literature classroom; temporality, emergence, and the nation in Joyce before Ulysses. Longer studies of modernist Gothic and of Wilde’s place in modernism.

Honors, Grants and Awards

  • Visiting Scholar, UCLA (Clark Library, Summers 2007–2009)
  • Senior Research Fellow, International School of Humanistic Theory, Santiago de Compostela (1998)
  • Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, University of Konstanz (1987–88; 1983–84)
  • Mellon Post-doctoral Fellow, Wesleyan U Center for Humanities (1979–80)

Other Professional Activities

  • Co-chair, Modernism Seminar (Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard), 2006–present
  • Editorial advisory boards of PMLA (2008–2011), Modern Fiction Studies, Joyce Studies Annual, The James Joyce Quarterly, Style, JIYS (Journal of the International Yeats Society)
  • Modern Language Association: Delegate Assembly (1997–99); Independent scholars prize committee (1999–2001); Executive Committees: Late 19th & early 20th-century English literature (1996–2000), Anglo-Irish Literature Discussion Group (2002–06), The Teaching of Literature (2008-2013), Anthropology & Literature (2017-2022)
  • Seminars and lectures at various international summer schools: James Joyce (Dublin), W. B. Yeats (Sligo), and T. S. Eliot (London).

Profile Types

20th-Century American Literature, 20th-Century British & Irish Literature, Contemporary and 21st-Century Literature, Literary and Cultural Theory, and Poetry and Poetics

 

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