Education

BA University of South Carolina (English)
PhD University of Chicago (Comparative Literature)

Specialization

   • Romanticism
   • Eighteenth-Century Literature
   • History of the Novel
   • Book History
   • History of Science

Courses

CPLT 415 / ARTH 390 / ENGL 439   Giovanni Battista Piranesi and 19c European Literature, Architecture, and Cartography
CPLT 703   The Printed Text in Deconstruction, Book History, and Digital Humanities
ENG 288   British Literature Survey
ENG 419   Reorienting Plot: Maps and Fiction
ENG 724   Reading, Thinking, and Feeling in the Romantic Period
SCHC 281 The Art of Information: Culture and History through Diagrams, Graphs, and Maps
SCHC 352 Proseminar in British Literature (Ignatius Sancho: The First Black British Author, Composer, and Voter)
SCHC 457  Frankenstein: Sources, Revisions, Influence
SCHC 457  Piranesi and Romanticism: Architecture and the Literary Imagination

Bio

My teaching and research focus on British and French literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Broadly speaking, I study Romanticism, the Enlightenment, the novel, the history of science, and book history. More specifically, I am interested in fiction’s engagement with visual experience (especially novelistic perspective), historical conceptions of sympathy, and graphic representations of knowledge. My recent teaching and research have focused on interdisciplinary approaches to the works of Giovanni Battista Piranesi in print and digital media.

My book, Vicarious Narratives: A Literary History of Sympathy, 1750-1850 (Oxford University Press, 2019), describes fiction’s formal engagement with theories of feeling against the backdrop of abolitionism and imperialism. It argues that Romantic-era fiction responds to Enlightenment theories of shared feeling with a novelistic model of sympathy that struggles to overcome human difference through the active engagement with narrative—through hearing, re-telling, and transcribing the stories of others. Central topics include moral philosophy, historical conceptions of race, sentimentalism and abolition, the French Revolution, fraternity and kinship, and narrative form.

Current Research Projects

My current research includes articles on the correspondence between Ignatius Sancho and Laurence Sterne, a short book on Romantic poetry and book history, and a large digital humanities project on Piranesi (digitalpiranesi.org). This project has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and, at USC, the Office of the Vice President for Research, the Humanities Collaborative, the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, and the Magellan Scholar Program.

Publications

   • “Romanticism’s Media and the Digital Piranesi,” Studies in Romanticism (Fall 2024): 303-327
   • “Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the Control of Nature, and the Logic of the Book” 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 29 (Spring 2024): 127-155
   • “Perspectives on Slavery: The ‘Description of the Brooks Slave Ship’ and the African Girl of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy” Romanticism on the Net 77 (Fall 2022)
   • “‘Life and Food for Future Years’: Revisiting ‘Tintern Abbey,’” Wordsworth Circle (Spring 2022): 1-24.
   • “Graphic Constructions of Knowledge in Piranesi’s Maps and Diderot’s Encyclopédie,” Eighteenth-Century Studies (Summer 2021): 957-978
   • Vicarious Narratives: A Literary History of Sympathy, 1750-1850 (Oxford University Press, 2019)
   • “‘Irritable Reaching’ and the Conditions of Romantic Mediation,” in Keats’s Negative Capability: New Origins and Afterlives, ed. Brian Rejack and Michael Theune (Liverpool UP, 2019): 108-121
   • “‘To Know What You Are All Thinking’: Riddles and Minds in Jane Austen’s Emma” Poetics Today (Winter 2018): 651-678
   • “Fictional Footnotes, Novelistic Mediation, and Romantic Orientalism: Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah” European Romantic Review  (Dec 2015): 773-787
   • “Theorizing Character in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda” Nineteenth-Century Literature (March 2013): 433-456
   • “Written on the Brow: Character, Narrative, and the Face in Byron and Austen” Nineteenth-Century Contexts (Dec 2012): 1-15
   • “Translating Sympathy by the Letter: Henry Mackenzie, Sophie de Condorcet, and Adam Smith” Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Fall 2009): 71-98
   • “Novelistic Sympathy in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” Studies in Romanticism (Spring 2009): 3-22, reprinted in Frankenstein: Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations (2013)

Recent Conference Presentations

   • “The Nature of the Book: Poetry and Print in Erasmus Darwin’s ‘Loves of the Plants’” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Toronto (April 2024)
   • “Black British Authorship: Printing and Reading Ignatius Sancho’s Letters” North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, Huntsville, TX (April 2023)
   • “Media Logics: The Digital Piranesi” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Baltimore (Mar 2022)
   • “Erasmus Darwin’s ‘Loves of the Plants’: Verse, Note, Image, and Index” British Association of Romantic Studies (Aug 2021)
   • “Visualizing Historical Knowledge: Giovanni Piranesi’s Layered Images of Roman Aqueducts” International Assn. of Word & Image Studies (July 2021)
   • “From Page to Screen: A New Look at Piranesi’s Annotated Images” Piranesi@300 International Conference (May 2021)
   • “Giovanni Piranesi and the Digital Eighteenth Centuries” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (April 2021)
   • “Mapping Knowledge and Mapping Rome in Piranesi” Modern Language Association (Jan 2020)
   • “The Elements and Metaphysics of Typography” North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (Aug 2019)