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).

I published a book on social mistakes (saying the wrong thing, wearing the wrong thing, eating peas with your knife, etc.) in the nineteenth-century novel. I'm at work at two other projects. The first is a critical and historical account of narrative theory. I am also at work on a book that looks at ways in which difficult arguments about war are embodied in the cinematic style of some British war films.