I did my graduate work at the University of Virginia and Columbia University and joined Berkeley's English Department in 2002. I teach courses on nineteenth-century British literature, the novel, literary theory, psychoanalysis, and narrative theory.
War Pictures: Cinema, Violence, and Style in Britain, 1939-1945 (Fordham University Press, 2017).
Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford University Press, 2008).
Against Oligarchies, Against Bosses: A Conversation with Richard Rorty, with Derek Nystrom (Charlottesville: Prickly Pear Pamphlets, 1998).
"J. M. Keynes and the Visible Hands," Public Books, January 15, 2021: https://www.publicbooks.org/j-m-keynes-and-the-visible-hands/.
"Story, Discourse, Dunkirk," modernism/modernity (print plus), July 7, 2020: https://doi.org/10.26597/mod.0149.
"RAND Narratology," Representations, Vol. 149 No. 1, Winter 2020, 31-72.
“‘Postscript: 1976’: E. P. Thompson and the River of Fire,” in Victorian Literature and Culture, Vol. 47, Nos. 4, 2019.
“Keyword: Democracy,” Victorian Literature and Culture, Vol. 46, Nos. 3-4, 2018.
“Epic/Novel,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Novel, ed. Eric Bulson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
“Narrative Theory’s Longue durée,” in The Cambridge Companion to Narrative Theory, ed. Matthew Garrett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
“Why Nixon Is Tricky for Novelists,” Public Books, May 24, 2017: http://www.publicbooks.org/why-nixon-is-tricky-for-novelists.
“Let’s Get Real, Real Gone for a Change: Jameson’s Antinomies,” invited response to Frederic Jameson’s The Antinomies of Realism, Victorian Studies, Vol. 57, No. 1, Autumn 2014, 105-112.
Introduction to “Search,” a special forum in Representations, Vol. 127 No. 1, Summer 2014, 55-56.
Introduction to “Financialization and the Culture Industry,” a special issue of Representations, co-authored with Dan Blanton and Colleen Lye, Vol. 126 No. 1, Spring 2014, 1-8.
Response to "Deontatively, Technically, Literally," a special issue of Represenations, eds., Elaine Freedgood and Cannon Schmitt, April 21, 2014: https://www.representations.org/two-responses-to-denotatively-technically-literally.
“Caucus-Racing,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 47, No. 1, 2014, 11-23.
“Hardy’s 1900,” MLQ, Vol. 75, No. 1, 57-75.
“Celia Johnson’s Face,” English Language Notes (49.2, Fall / Winter 2011).
"Before and Afterwardsness in Henry James," in Narrative Middles: Navigating the Nineteenth-Century Novel, edited by Caroline Levine and Mario Ortiz-Roblez (Ohio State University Press, 2011).
“Some Versions of Syllepsis,” Partial Answers (Volume 9, Number 1): 177-88.
"Make No Mistake: Getting it Right in The Princess Casamassima," Novel: A Forum on Fiction Novel (Volume 43, Number 1):60-64.
Review of Gwen Hyman’s Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel in Victorian Studies (Volume 53, Number 2): 371-373.
Review of William Flesch’s Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altrusitic Punishment, and Other Biological Compnents of Fiction in Novel: A Forum on Fiction (Volume 43, Number 3): 501-505
"The Life and Death and Death of Colonel Blimp," Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 1. (2008), pp. 90-114.
Review of Kerry McSweeney’s What’s the Import?: Nineteenth-Century Poems and Contemporary Critical Practice in Victorian Studies, Vol. 51, No 1, (2008), pp. 192-94.
"Stupid Sensations: Henry James, Good Form, and Reading Middlemarch Without a Brain," The Henry James Review, Vol. 28, No. 3 (2007), pp. 292-298
"Narrative," The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, ed. David Kastan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
"Twentieth-Century Novel Theory," Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Novel (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009).
By appointment