麻豆精选

• MA, PhD (UC Santa Barbara): Comparative Literature, with fields in 19C British Literature, 19C French Literature, and Art History
• BA (South Florida): Honors Degree in Liberal Studies in Comparative Literature (Cum Laude)
• Senior Fellow, Higher Education Academy

I received my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I studied nineteenth-century British and French literature and art history. I stayed on at UCSB as a 3-year post-doctoral lecturer before moving to the University of Texas-Pan American in 2006, where I ultimately served as Associate Professor of English and Vice Provost Fellow. In January 2015, I took up my current position at the University 麻豆精选.

I teach British literature of the long nineteenth century at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

I am willing to supervise PhD projects related to Victorian literature and culture, especially print history, text/image interface, Oscar Wilde, George Meredith, George Eliot, empathy and affect studies, and fashion. I am also affiliated with the Sexuality and Gender Studies Programme and welcome related projects.

Find out more - our PhD English Literature  page has information about doctoral research at the University 麻豆精选.

My scholarship focuses on Victorian literature and culture broadly defined, and I鈥檓 especially intrigued by the study and depiction of the creative process, the self/other relationship, and the textual/visual interface; these interests also drive my work in textual editing.聽

My varied research interests reflect my interdisciplinary background in literary studies and art history. My first monograph,聽Victorian Lessons in Empathy and Difference聽(Victorian Critical Interventions, Ohio State University Press, 2011), drew on Levinasian notions of alterity to argue - against the grain of many other studies on empathy in the Victorian novel - that works by Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy, and Whistler teach fellow feeling by exposing the limits of human intersubjectivity.

As an experienced textual editor, I view manuscripts both as artefacts of the creative process and as examples par excellence of the textual/visual interface. My co-edited anniversary edition of George Meredith鈥檚聽Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside聽(Yale UP, 2012) shines new light on Meredith鈥檚 masterful sonnet series - itself an astonishing articulation of the difficulty of intersubjectivity - by returning it to its original context.听听More recently, my editorial efforts have turned to Oscar Wilde.聽Oscar Wilde鈥檚 Chatterton: Literary History, Romanticism, and the Art of Forgery聽(Yale UP, 2015),聽co-written with Joseph Bristow (UCLA), includes a critical edition of Wilde鈥檚 鈥淐hatterton鈥� notebook and his previously-unpublished notes on Dante Gabriel Rossetti鈥檚 1881聽Ballads and Sonnets. The study reveals that Wilde鈥檚 research on the young Chatterton informs his deepest engagements with Romanticism, plagiarism, and forgery. Bristow and I have also published on Wilde鈥檚 鈥淭he Decay of Lying鈥� (having located a fair copy manuscript that had been missing from the scholarly record for over fifty years). Along with Yvonne Ivory (U of South Carolina), we will edit the final volumes of the OET聽Complete Works of Oscar Wilde聽for Oxford University Press, a project supported by an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship for 2016-2017.

In addition to numerous articles on nineteenth-century fiction and poetry, I have also published extensively on Victorian fashion, including articles on Aesthetic Dress and Victorian Fancy Dress culture (in聽Fashion Theory), the crinoline (in聽BRANCH), and mourning attire (in聽Victorian Literature and Culture), and a book chapter on the Victorian sartorial antecedents to steampunk (in聽Drawing on the Victorians).听Fashioning the Victorians: A Critical Sourcebook, was published by Bloomsbury Academic in Spring 2018.

I am also co-editor of聽Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism.

• Head of Department of English Literature
• Co-Editor, Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism
• Advisory Board, COVE (Central Online Victorian Educator)
• Editorial Board, Literary Texts and the Popular Marketplace series, Routledge