Biography
I teach courses that radiate outward from Anglophone Modernism, especially Modernist fiction. I am especially interested in questions about knowledge, self-construction, form, and the places these concerns meet. Courses I teach might ask what kind of knowing fiction can do, or how form mediates or constructs that knowledge; we might try to sort out how writers use archetype to test the ways we identify with characters, or maybe how literary form creates slippage between the categories of “character” and “thought experiment” or “caricature.” Among the courses I teach are subjects like “Art, War, and Abstraction”—which focuses on mathematical and scientific discourses in literary artworks from the early 20th century—or “Modernism and the Manifesto,” which attends to the ways writers’ social and political commitments as expressed in their nonfictional writing shift or solidify when they enter fictional or poetic contexts.
I also offer a First Year Seminar called “Ridiculous Writing,” on experimental, whimsical rhetorics and styles available to writers from across many genres and historical periods. In that course and all my courses, I encourage students to use unconventional rhetorical and stylistic methods to build arguments, and to bring all the literary tools they encounter in course texts to their writing assignments. This interest in unconventional methods pairs nicely with my strong investment in familiarizing students with hypercanonical writers like James Joyce, on whom I offer a single-author seminar. All of my courses try to expose students to lesser-known writers from the era and subject at hand, but at the same time I believe it is my obligation to give students a shared language around mainstay authors like Joyce that allows them entry into literary discourse both inside and outside of the academy.
My own writing can be found in Contemporary Literature (on a hieratic character type in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet) and Renaissance Drama (on self-definition in contrast to archetypes in Shakespeare’s Henriad), as well as public writing in The Atlantic and poetry in JAKE, The Hellebore, Measure, and a few other venues. I am at work on two larger projects: one, called What Do You Know? Learning from Literary Artworks, describes an alternative form of knowledge we might develop from literature. The other, called Allegorical Realities, looks at the conjunction of notions of type with psychological realism in twentieth century writing.
Outside of academic contexts, you might find me agonizing over coffee methodologies, fiddling (not literally) with my guitars, or trying with varying success to improve my foreign language skills.
