Lecturer
For full CV click here
My research and teaching examine 19th and 20th century literature—especially British and Irish modernism. I’m interested in modernism’s deeply embodied form, and my research often asks how modernist writers envisioned the body in relationship to experiences of disease, disability, gender, and race. My current book project studies the influence of medical discourses on the modernist Künstlerroman, or artist novel. The artist novel, I argue, responds to the increased pathologizing of modernist form and style by recrafting and amplifying longstanding narratives about health and artistic virtuosity. The book studies artist novels by writers like Oscar Wilde, W. Somerset Maugham, James Joyce, Radclyffe Hall, and Virginia Woolf. I’m also at work on a second project which studies British narratives of disease and disability set in South America. This project frames narratives of decline within the legacy of England’s unsuccessful conquest of the area.
Alongside my research, I teach courses in British and Irish modernism, 19th and 20th century Anglophone literature, and special topics courses on disability studies, detective and espionage fiction, and the works of James Joyce. Over the years, I have taught at the University of Florida, Oklahoma State University, and now Boston University. I’m an advocate of public humanities and extracurricular literary studies, and I’ve joined and started public book clubs in Boston and hope to foster more literary community within and beyond the halls of BU. Some of my favorite writers are Jane Austen, James Baldwin, Elizabeth Bowen, Joan Didion, James Joyce, Sally Rooney, Zadie Smith, Virginia Woolf, and Richard Wright—and I’ve recently started working through Proust. My current extracurricular goal is to read more global 19th century social novels, especially Flaubert and Dostoevsky.
Teaching and Research Interests
British and Irish Modernism
The 19th– and 20th-century novel
Disability studies/medical humanities
Masculinity
Art and visual culture
British informal empire in South America
Virginia Woolf
James Joyce
Selected Publications
“Reading Literary Maps: The Call to National Defense in The Riddle of the Sands,” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, Duke University Press (forthcoming)
“Disease, Disability, and Narrative Collapse in The Moon and Sixpence,” Disability and Disease in the Novel, ed. Lydia Cooper and Matthew Reznicek, Studies in the Novel, Johns Hopkins University Press (forthcoming)
“The Aesthetic Turn in Disability and Degeneration,” Disability on the Cusp: Transitions, Transformations, Intersections, Cusp: Late 19th-/Early 20th-Century Cultures (2024)
“Joyce, Bloom, and Max Nordau.” Review of Unfit: Jewish Degeneration and Modernism, Marilyn Reizbaum, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. James Joyce Literary Supplement (2024)
“‘Dark men in mien and movement’: Blindness and the Body in Ulysses,” Joyce Writing Disability. Ed. Jeremy Colangelo, Gainesville: University of Florida Press (2022)
“Physical Culture and the Aesthetics of Jewish Regeneration in Ulysses,” James Joyce Quarterly, Volume 58.3, Spring, University of Tulsa (2021)
“A Modernist Teaches Analysis,” Who Teaches Writing, ed. Joshua Daniel, Open Educational Resources, Oklahoma State University Libraries (2021)
“Protein Powders and Pastes: Muscle Foods for the Twentieth Century Man,” The Modernist Review (2020)