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 recent book, Pathologies of Motion, explores the intimacy between later Enlightenment medicine, aesthetic criticism, and poetic practice during a period marked both by escalating geographical mobility and, at the same time, by increasing scientific attention to the internal “motions” (as they were called) constituting the physiologies and sensibilities of bodies on the move. The book explores how all three areas of writing developed together as environmental sciences (in the original sense of scientia, or knowledge), alert to the precarious ecology between persons and their worlds, and therefore as sites for thinking about the historical present. I continue to be interested in the experience of historicity and the literary forms of abstract or distant historical processes; these are questions I am addressing in an essay-in-progress on the relationship between personification—as the making of a person—and depopulation, the unmaking and reconstituting of populations. A larger emerging project, inspired by the poetry of Charlotte Smith, is on coastal aesthetics and collective subjectivity in the long-Romantic era. Finally, with Brian McGrath, I am finishing an edited collection of the late work of Geoffrey Hartman. Entitled Holocaust and Hope: Literature, Testimony, Media, the volume includes essays by Hartman that were left unpublished at the time of his death, as well as a co-authored introductory
