I teach and write in the fields of later 17th-Century British literature (especially Milton), 18th-Century British Literature (especially after 1740), and Romanticism. Within those historical periods, my interests gravitate toward questions in aesthetics and poetics, science and literature, and literary historiography. My first book was Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge 2004; paperback edition 2008). My new book, Pathologies of Motion: Historical Thinking in Medicine, Aesthetics and Poetics (Yale University Press, 2023), was awarded the Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize for the year's best book in Romantic studies from the International Conference on Romanticism. It also received Honorable Mention for the 2023 Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize, for the best academic book of literature, science, and the arts, from the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts.
See also under Selected Publications.
My recently published book, Pathologies of Motion, studies late Enlightenment aesthetics, poetics, and medicine as overlapping ways of comprehending the dislocations of historical existence as these imbalances lodged in the movements of bodies and minds. It shows the ways in which these emerging and still-intertwined sciences (in the 18th-century sense of “science” as a kind of knowledge) were alert to the precarious ecology between persons and their worlds. The book focuses, in particular, on how each was concerned about the affective, embodied experience of place and displacement during an era defined by unprecedented degrees and kinds of mobility. I continue to study the experience of historicity and the literary forms of abstract historical processes, with essays-in-progress on the relationship between personification—as the making of a person—and depopulation, as the unmaking and reconstituting of populations. A second, different project is a co-edited collection, with an introduction, of the late work of Geoffrey Hartman, including essays never published, which will be available to readers for the first time.
