I specialize in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and culture, with particular interest in poetry, visual art, and the civic functions they have been engaged to serve.
I am completing a book, Adorned: The Romantic Poetics of Ornament, that makes the case that ornament is an essential but neglected poetic concept. It looks to Romantic-era writing about linguistic ornament as, most immediately, a guide to reading the ornamental poetry of the eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries; and, more broadly, as a locus for reconsidering the critical expectations that color the evaluation and enjoyment of poetry today.
My other ongoing book project is a study of miscellaneousness as an aesthetic and organizing principle in popular bibliographic formats (commonplace books, almanacs, albums, annuals, periodicals). It argues that the growing prominence of the miscellany in the late eighteenth century lays the groundwork for the rise of a modern—that is, phenomenologically-oriented—genre theory. Distinguished by a resistance to classifying principles, the miscellany provided a way of thinking of genre on the whole as a shifting field of interpretation, and not a rigid taxonomic structure.
My courses are regularly cross-listed with the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and in addition to teaching about literature, I have enjoyed designing courses that relate constructions of gender to aspects of everyday life, like childhood, food practices, walking, emotion, illness, and, of course, reading and writing.