Graduate Advising and Teaching
I teach introductory courses on British Romanticism and more specialized seminars on theoretical and historical topics. I also regularly supervise graduate students working on eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature, media, culture, and intellectual history; reception, adaptation, remediation, and literary afterlives; historiography; the history of the novel; and ecology. I have directed or co-directed dissertations on: Romantic novels, the law, and the idea of “character” evidence; Victorian investigative journalism, slum fiction, and liberalism; and the nineteenth-century novel's refashioning of Biblical authority. I have also been a first reader on dissertations devoted to a variety of topics, including early Victorian melodramas and “penny dreadfuls,” the concept of “medical liberty” in nineteenth-century literature and alternative medicine, and video game remediations of literary texts.
DISSERTATIONS DIRECTED OR CO-DIRECTED, WITH JOB PLACEMENTS:
ADAM KOZACZKA, Romantic Legalism: Character Evidence and the British Novel (Syracuse University, May 2019). Current employment: Assistant Professor, English, Texas A&M International University, El Paso, TX
TANUSHREE GHOSH, Guilty Looks: The Pains and Pleasures of Liberal Reform in Late-Victorian Britain (Syracuse University, May 2011). Current employment: Associate Professor, English, University of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha, NE
JON SINGLETON, The Suspension of (Dis)Belief: Novel and Bible in Victorian Society (Syracuse University, April 2010). Current employment: Professor, English, Harding University, Searcy, AR
DISSERTATIONS, FIRST READER, WITH JOB PLACEMENTS:
JOHNATHAN SANDERS, Agency, Abstraction, and Play: Towards a Systems Approach to Game Adaptations, (Syracuse University, February 2022). Current employment: Visiting Assistant Professor, Reed College, Portland, OR
HAEJOO KIM, Medical Liberty and Alternative Health Practices in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Syracuse University, May 2021). Current employment: Assistant Professor, English Language and Literature, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea
ELIZABETH STEARNS, Jailbreakers, Villains, and Vampires: Representations of Criminality in Early Victorian Popular Texts (Syracuse University, April 2013). Current employment: Lecturer, English, The Ohio State University—Newark Campus, Newark, OH.
JESSICA KUSKEY, The Body Machinic: Technology, Labor, and the Mechanized Body in Victorian Culture (Syracuse University, October 2012). Current employment: Professor, English, Mount Wachusett Community College, Gardner, MA
COURSES
ENG 630: Intro to Romantic Studies
This course examines different ways that scholars have engaged in recent years with the literature and media of Britain’s “Romantic” period (1789-1832). Each day of class we will pair some topically-related primary texts with a “classic” critical text and some more recent critical materials. Topical foci of the course include: ecology and environmentalism; media and mediation; the emergence of historicist thought; the history of the novel; human rights discourse; sympathy and affect; neuroscience and cognition; and identities, identity formations, and celebrity. Primary text readings cover a wide variety of forms, genres, and media, including poetry, novels, drama, paintings, prints, gardens, political tracts, philosophical treatises, essays, sermons, and histories.
ENG 730: The Novel in the Age of Jane Austen
The “Age of Austen” in this course’s title refers primarily to the historical era in which Jane Austen lived and anonymously wrote (1775-1817). We devote roughly two-thirds of the semester to locating Austen’s novels within the complexities of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century British historical contexts in which they were produced, including the broader literary marketplace and media ecology of the era. Since the early 1990s, however, our own era has become a different kind of “Age of Austen”: Austen’s novels, their remixes, and their remediations so thoroughly saturate global culture that her name is now as well known internationally as Shakespeare’s. In the final third of the course, we study the media ecologies of the present through the specific case of how different new media have used Austen. We will be challenging ourselves, too, to think about how Austen’s demonstrated suitability to different kinds of new media might be able to help us recognize and recover specific ways that her novels were media experiments all along.
ENG 730: Participatory Romanticism
This course examines the distinctive medial afterlives of four “major” Romantic-era cultural productions: William Blake’s so-called “composite art,” Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The course asks students to take seriously the Deleuzian charge to study what texts do rather than what they mean, even as it also challenges them to discern the conditions of possibility whereby the texts came to do the things that they do. Each part of the course concentrates on a different mode of textual doing, a different kind of audience participation in the life of the text to which the text seems somehow to have made itself distinctly available over time. To the extent that we can credit any of these texts with being responsible for some of the distinctive modes whereby their audiences have participated in making them do things, we also approach each text with an eye out for the possibility that has in fact been theorizing “participating” and “doing” all along.
ENG 730: Heritage Culture
This course examines the popularization of national history—its politics over time, and its theoretical promises and limitations—with particular attention to the historical novel and its relationship to historical tourism in Britain and the U.S. Most courses on the history of history attend to major theoretical and methodological currents within the discipline of history over time. This one focuses instead on genres, institutions, media, and practices that the Anglo-American historical discipline has often scoffed at (and vice versa) but whose historical authority has, for better and for worse, held great cultural sway at different moments. These include genres like historical novels and period piece films, institutions like living history museums, media like video games, and practices like reenacting and tourism.
ENG 730: Conspiracy and Crime in 19th-Century British Literature
Criminal law has long localized and individuated responsibility through the figures of the criminal and criminal conspirator. This course examines how nineteenth-century British novels critiqued and helped construct the notions of individuated historical responsibility upon which the modern criminal justice system relies. To focus our own historical inquiry, we pay particular attention to the politics and explanatory forms of nineteenth-century detective fiction. The general historical task of the course is to identify the particularity of detective fiction as a genre by looking at a wide variety of writings about mystery, secrecy, conspiracy, the law, and detection drawn from every corner of British culture during the nineteenth century. But the broader task—as much a theoretical as an historical one—is to think about the relationship between historicist and legal modes of explanation by studying how, and with what cultural effects, different genres of nineteenth-century crime, mystery, and conspiracy literature construct and critique notions of historical responsibility, determination, and cultural systematicity.