I teach a range of courses in the English department, focussing mainly on British literature since the Renaissance. My research has focussed on the aesthetics of minor genres, such as notes, fragments, and aphorisms. My first book, Notework: Victorian Literature and Nonlinear Style, was published by Stanford University Press in 2021. It argues that the nineteenth-century writer’s notebook is best understood as a genre. Subsequently, I have published on the aesthetics of bitchiness (a purely academic interest, of course, for GLQ), and on Roland Barthes's ambivalence about fragments (in New Literary History).
At the moment I am working on a range of articles and chapters on John Guillory, the in-person, Darwin and philosophies of use, Roland Barthes's unwritten novel, and the paradoxical genre of the "genre-defying."
Degrees
PhD English Literature, University of Toronto (2014)
Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University (2014-2015)
Book
Notework: Victorian Literature and Nonlinear Style. Stanford University Press, 2021.
(Honorable Mention: 2021 Sonya Rudikoff Award)
Articles & Chapters
"Orality and Guillory," Texas Studies in Literature and Language (forthcoming)
"Darwin, Association, and Teleology" in The Associative Imagination, eds. Eliza Haughton-Shaw and Louis Klee, Oxford University Press (forthcoming)
Cluster editor and introduction: "The Twentieth Century," Cusp: Late 19th/Early 20th Century Cultures (Spring 2026)
"Idols of the Fragment: Barthes and Critique." New Literary History. Vol 55, No 1 (Winter 2024)
“The Importance of Being Bitchy" (with Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud). Gay and Lesbian Quarterly 30.2 (April 2024)
“Reading Machine Print.” Technology and Literature. Cambridge Critical Concepts. Ed. Adam Hammond. Cambridge University Press, 2024.
“Notebooks: The Lichtenberg Way.” The Unfinished Book. Eds. Alexandra Gillespie and Deidre Lynch. Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature. Oxford University Press, 2021.
“Hopkins’s Notebooks and Microsocial Form.” Victorian Literature and Culture. 48:2 (Summer 2020): 455-469.
“Wilde at Oxford: A Truce with Facts.” Philosophy and Oscar Wilde. Ed. Michael Bennett. Palgrave, 2017: 9-27.
“Social Notes: Oscar Wilde, Francis Bacon, and the Medium of Aphorism.” Journal of Victorian Culture. 18:4 (December 2013): 453-471.
“Oscar Wilde’s Notebook on Philosophy.” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies. 32.2. (Spring 2013): 21-31.
Contact Information
Tuesday 2:30-4:30 or by appointment