Undergraduate
I teach introductory-level and upper-division English literature courses at Syracuse University, with a particular focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, the history of the novel, gender, the environment, and critical theory.
COURSES
ENG 114: British Literature, 1789-present
Few nations in the world have changed more dramatically in the past 250 years than Great Britain, and these changes are evident throughout its literature. This introductory survey course, which I offer every fall, moves briskly through more than two centuries of Britain’s literary history, covering the art and culture of four distinct periods, spanning the years 1789 to the present: Romantic, Victorian, Modern, and Post-War/Postcolonial. Historical topics include: changes in literary forms and genres; slavery; political revolution; the industrial revolution; the Enlightenment; apocalyptic fears; urbanization; evolution; religion; social reform movements; race, class, gender, and sexuality; nationalism; colonialism and its aftermath; the World Wars; the politics of the English language; cloning; Black Lives Matter; and Brexit.
ETS 305: Critical Analysis: Historicism
This course takes what seems like a basic question—how is the meaning of a text related to its context?—and tries to complicate the question to the point that we’re no longer confident how to answer it. Along the way, we examine how scholars from various schools of historical-minded criticism tried to answer this question in the late twentieth century, including Marxists, Foucauldians, New Historicists, and Cultural Materialists. We also examine the problems with their answers from the perspective of reception studies, postcolonial studies, postmodern ethics, media studies, and trauma theory. The general goal of the course is to realize the interpretive quagmires we find ourselves in as soon as we acknowledge—as many of these critics do—that all historical moments are unique, that literally every aspect of the world has a history, and that the problems of how to understand and represent history (including the historicity of the present) are inescapably bound up with language and its inherent instabilities.
ETS 310: Romanticism
From 1770-1830, Britain saw tremendous formal experiments in representation, spanning a broad range of arts and media: poetry, fiction, drama, pantomime, painting, print-making, visual projection, fashion, architecture, and garden design. Though each of these experiments sometimes gets called “Romantic,” one aim of this course is to ask how well that term captures the things that might make this period’s cultural output cohere as a distinctive “period.” Another is to think about to what extent it might make sense to think about “Romanticism” as an ongoing cultural movement, sensibility or way of thinking, one that persists into the present. With an eye towards discovering connections across disparate media, disparate aspects of culture, and even disparate times and places, this course examines transformations in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century British representational media as they relate to many other kinds of historical changes: philosophical, political, geopolitical, economic, environmental, scientific, and technological.
ENG 311: Romanticism and the Environment
The modern environmental movement found early expression in British poetry, novels, and painting between 1770-1845. This course examines how British artists in this period responded to a variety of dramatic developments: the Industrial Revolution and the privatization of public lands creating radical changes to the landscape, ecologies, and rural communities; natural scientists challenging religious beliefs about the Earth and its organisms by introducing the notions of “geologic time” and “extinction”; new religious movements fueling conservation efforts by promoting the idea of nature’s divinity; new aesthetic tastes for landscape contributing to nature tourism and to new media (panoramas, photographs, stereographs, picturesque gardens); and politicians turning “nature” into a political football through debates over “natural rights” and “natural law.” At the same time, the course is also a course in mediation and, as such, asks students to think about how various Romantic texts treat the environment both as an object to be mediated and as already a medium. At various points throughout the semester, we then look for the presence of “Romantic” relationships to the environment in various contemporary media texts and art projects.
ENG 360: Reading British Masculinities, 1700-present
This course examines the role of various British literary texts in reflecting and shaping masculinity and masculine identities at different moments during the past three centuries. By no means does the course purport to offer an exhaustive history of masculinity and masculine identities over this lengthy period of time. Instead, the course unfolds as a series of case-studies of significant masculine identities that were objects of particular veneration, anxiety, frustration, or critique at different points during the historical periods covered by the course.
ENG 400: Jane Austen in Context—Hers and Ours
Eight days of on-site study in England complement a semester of on-campus coursework analyzing Jane Austen’s novels. For the first half of the semester, we learn about early 19th-century Britain by reading Austen’s novels alongside other texts from the period. For the second half of the semester, we study our modern, global world through the uses that different people, groups, and media make of Austen’s novels today. The complementary halves of the course are bridged by a trip to England over Spring Break, where site visits include London, the resort town of Bath, the naval shipyards of Portsmouth, the university town of Oxford, several grand English country houses and gardens, a ruined Gothic abbey, a stunning coastal hike, and the rural village of Chawton in which Austen wrote many of her novels.
ENG 400: The Mysteries of London
Nineteenth-century crime and mystery novels continue to haunt our imagination of London: the city still derives some of its allure from its associations with Victorian gaslights, cobblestone alleyways, foggy nights, detectives, opium dens, and the occasional serial killer. Through a combination of coursework in Syracuse and eight days of on-site study in London over spring break, this course examines the mysteries and mystery literature of Victorian London and their continued fascination for contemporary novelists, filmmakers, and tourists. Site visits include: various sites associated with Sherlock Holmes; the creepy West Cemetery at Highgate; the law buildings, prisons, courthouses, execution sites, and back alleys immortalized by Charles Dickens; the smugglers’ steps, warehouses, and old sailors’ pubs that line the Thames River; and the East End neighborhoods terrorized in 1888 by Jack the Ripper. We also do some decidedly less grim forms of on-site study related to the course, including visiting some of the world’s premiere art and design museums, a stunning cathedral, a perfectly preserved Victorian townhouse, and a suburban London manor house.
ENG 410: The Historical Novel
Historical novels, or novels about the past, always raise questions about how one can know and represent the past, why understanding or refusing to understand a particular past might be important for those living in different historical moments, and what it means to represent the past in a novel as opposed to some other medium. This course looks at how and why these questions get formulated and answered differently at different historical moments. We do so by studying a few of the earliest examples of national historical novels alongside some contemporary examples, and also alongside other historical media from their respective eras. In general, the course looks at how a novelistic genre emerges, dissolves, and reforms. But more broadly, it examines the artistic, political, and theoretical projects of contemporary national-historical literature by thinking about its relationship to an earlier period characterized by intense interest in, and deep anxiety about, representing the national past.
ENG 421: The Mysteries of the Manor House
In fiction and in film, the country manor is a haunted house—always figuratively, sometimes literally. British and Irish novelists, especially, have invested the manor’s stately walls, immaculate grounds, and luxurious interiors—not to mention its ruined wings, secret gardens, and sometimes scheming inhabitants—with a host of conflicting cultural associations. It can be a symbol of national stability, wealth, tradition, taste, moral improvement, feminine refinement, and order. Depending on the novel, it can just as easily stand for decay, excess, domination, patriarchy, repression, simulation, scandal, and mystery. In this course, we will study how different generations of novelists and filmmakers use the setting of the manor house to comment on England and Britain, and to define what it means to be English and British. In so doing, we shall examine how manor house novels and films are often commenting in turn on the activity and artifice of national fiction-making.
ENG 440: History & the Sublime
This is a theory course in which we examine the activity, psychology, and politics of historical understanding. But we so by concerning ourselves with the limits of historical understanding—with explanatory failures, with overwhelming events, and with silent or inaccessible archives. Philosophy has long had a term, “the sublime,” to denote overwhelming objects and/or cognitive failures. One of the goals of this course is to think through the relevance of the philosophy of the sublime to the task of theorizing historical understanding. Indeed, among other things, we try to understand what is going on when a particular individual or group insists that a specific historical event is “sublime.” To make this workable, the course juxtaposes theoretical texts with case-studies of different “sublime” historical events, or events that, for one reason or another, overwhelmed various groups of people. Through its profound effect on the writers of its time, the first event that serves as one of our case studies, the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, contributed directly to the emergence of the philosophy of the sublime as we know it. In some sense, the course’s remaining three case studies reveal ways that, at least intellectually, we’re still feeling the effects of the Lisbon Earthquake.