Profile:
As scholar and teacher, I look to revealing the aesthetic pleasure of literature while also seeing its historical and cultural setting. Historical study, I feel, enables our understanding of the continuities and differences with the past. A cultural focus, particularly in gender studies, reveals the socially constructed nature of our assumptions about gender and sexuality as a way of understanding our own lives.Degrees Held:
PhD, English, Harvard University;
MA, English, Harvard University;
BA, Princeton UniversityProfessional Affiliations:
Editorial Board, Victorian Literature and Culture; Modern Language Association. Recent Publications:
BOOKS:
Victorian Technology: Invention, Innovation, and the Rise of the Machine. Praeger, 2009;
Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art. Cambridge UP, 1995.
ESSAYS
“Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds.” Victorian Literature and Culture 37 (2009);
“Birth of the Bestseller.” Victorian Literature and Culture 36 (2008);
“Samuel Butler as Late-Victorian Bachelor: Regulating and Representing the Homoerotic.” Samuel Butler, Victorian Against the Grain: A Critical Overview. Ed. James G. Paradis. U of Toronto P: Toronto, 2007;
“The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult.” Victorian Literature and Culture 35 (2007).Research Interests:
Study of Masculinities; History of Sexuality; Victorian Art; Culture and Technology.