My first book, American Snobs: Transatlantic Novelists, Liberal Culture, and the Genteel Tradition (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) shows that Henry Adams, Henry James, and Edith Wharton articulate their political thought in response to the Victorian liberalism that flourishes in Boston, especially at Harvard. Locating Adams, James, and Wharton within the history of higher education, I argue that these authors help to develop the ideas that shape the study of US literature during the twentieth century: the story of their responses to liberalism is also a story about the discipline of English and, more broadly, about how intellectuals have understood their political duties and powers. American Snobs disambiguates the varied elitisms and racisms of this trio's privileged set in order to show how they interrogate liberal ideas about education and democracy; in addition to proposing a new account of these authors' conservatisms, the book also offers a portrait of the Harvard milieu to which those conservatisms respond, bringing fresh attention to their connections with thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles William Eliot, Charles Eliot Norton, and Barrett Wendell.
I'm also at work on several newer projects. My next monograph will investigate the making of the Harvard Classics (1909) and how readers have used those books; an article in progress examines the role of white supremacism in one of the foundational texts of American literary history; and finally, I'm also co-editing a volume of James's short stories for the Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James.
Publications:
'Edith Wharton's Microscopist and the Science of Language.' Forthcoming in The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science.
'American Nervousness: Motherhood and the "Mental Activity of Women" in the Era of Sexual Anarchy.' In Edinburgh Companion to Fin-de-Siècle Literature, Culture and the Arts, edited by Josephine Guy, 361-380. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2018.
'"A Roaring and Discontinuous Universe": Edith Wharton's Modern Hauntings.' In The Routledge Companion to the Ghost Story, edited by Luke Thurston & Scott Brewer, 159-167. London: Routledge, 2018.
'"The Orthodox Creed of the Business World"? Philanthropy and Liberal Individualism in Edith Wharton's The Fruit of the Tree.' In Philanthropic Discourse in Anglo-American Literature, 1850-1920, edited by Frank Q. Christianson and Leslee Thorne-Murphy, 190-210. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2017.
'Mary Augusta Ward's "Perfect Economist" and the Logic of Anti-Suffragism.' ELH 82.4 (Winter 2015): 1213-1238.
'Henry James's Dramas of Cultivation: Liberalism and Democracy in The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima.' Henry James Review 36.2 (Summer 2015): 177-198.
'"This Immense Expense of Art": George Eliot and John Ruskin on Consumption and the Limits of Sympathy.' Nineteenth-Century Literature 65 (September 2010): 214-245.
Reviews:
Review of The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume Six: The American Novel 1870-1940, eds. Priscilla Wald and Michael A. Elliott. Review of English Studies 66.274 (April 2015): 392-394.
Review of Economic Woman: Demand, Gender, and Narrative Closure in Eliot and Hardy by Deanna K. Kreisel. Hardy Review 15.1 (Spring 2013): 99-102.
Review of Edith Wharton in Context, ed. Laura Rattray. Edith Wharton Review 29.1 (Spring 2013): 33-34.
Publications:
'Edith Wharton's Microscopist and the Science of Language.' Forthcoming in The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science.
'American Nervousness: Motherhood and the "Mental Activity of Women" in the Era of Sexual Anarchy.' In Edinburgh Companion to Fin-de-Siècle Literature, Culture and the Arts, edited by Josephine Guy, 361-380. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2018.
'"A Roaring and Discontinuous Universe": Edith Wharton's Modern Hauntings.' In The Routledge Companion to the Ghost Story, edited by Luke Thurston & Scott Brewer, 159-167. London: Routledge, 2018.
'"The Orthodox Creed of the Business World"? Philanthropy and Liberal Individualism in Edith Wharton's The Fruit of the Tree.' In Philanthropic Discourse in Anglo-American Literature, 1850-1920, edited by Frank Q. Christianson and Leslee Thorne-Murphy, 190-210. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2017.
'Mary Augusta Ward's "Perfect Economist" and the Logic of Anti-Suffragism.' ELH 82.4 (Winter 2015): 1213-1238.
'Henry James's Dramas of Cultivation: Liberalism and Democracy in The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima.' Henry James Review 36.2 (Summer 2015): 177-198.
'"This Immense Expense of Art": George Eliot and John Ruskin on Consumption and the Limits of Sympathy.' Nineteenth-Century Literature 65 (September 2010): 214-245.
Reviews:
Review of The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume Six: The American Novel 1870-1940, eds. Priscilla Wald and Michael A. Elliott. Review of English Studies 66.274 (April 2015): 392-394.
Review of Economic Woman: Demand, Gender, and Narrative Closure in Eliot and Hardy by Deanna K. Kreisel. Hardy Review 15.1 (Spring 2013): 99-102.
Review of Edith Wharton in Context, ed. Laura Rattray. Edith Wharton Review 29.1 (Spring 2013): 33-34.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9144-2458