Assistant Professor, Department of English & Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Ph.D. University of Chicago (2011), B.A. Yale University (2005)

Research Areas: British Romantic literature, especially poetry, prose, and political and aesthetic philosophy

My scholarship and teaching focus on the literature of the British Romantic period. I am particularly interested in the emergence, at that time, of those political formations we consider distinctly "modern"—including liberalism, secularism, radical or activist cultures, and the ideal of freedom—and how they inflect and are inflected by the formal and aesthetic practices of writing. Right now I'm working on two projects which explore normative and aberrant experiences of political citizenship or belonging. The first,The Political Romance, addresses the significance of love, intimacy, and attachment to Romantic discourses of liberalism and utopianism; the second, tentatively titled The Calamity Form, gives a critical history of literary realism in relation to the collective experience of ecological crisis or catastrophe.