In broadest terms, my work focuses on the literary, theoretical, and political writing of the long nineteenth century —an extended duration I understand to include the present. I'm also interested in visual culture, ecocriticism, and postcolonial studies. I'm most concerned most with how literary forms respond to and often contest the ongoing intellectual and material crises of the modernity we continue to inhabit. I describe specific projects in more detail below. Thanks for checking out the site.
Action Without Hope: Victorian Literature After Climate Collapse
A second book project builds on the arguments tested in Ecological Form and puts literary reading methods in dialogue with Victorian and contemporary thinking about ecological networks. Its aim is to show how the nineteenth century used literary forms to imagine systemic configurations so massive, distributed, and complex that they seemed to threaten the possibility of individual action -- and how certain thinkers, in spite of these entangled and often entropic structures, nevertheless conceived the possibility of change.
Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire
With Philip Steer (Massey University, NZ), I coedited a collection of essays that links human and natural scales of disaster in the nineteenth century and after. Published by Fordham UP in late 2018 (listed as 2019), the collection aims to show how Victorian thinking about empire and ecology can help us understand the often violent processes by which human beings were—and continue to be—incorporated into massive systems seemingly beyond their direct control.
Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty
My first book, Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (Oxford UP, 2016; paperback 2018), explores how Victorian writers expanded the capacities of literary form to account for the ongoing violence of liberal modernity.
No single year of Victoria's reign, 1837-1901, was without at least one imperial war. Taking the permanent war of the Pax Victoriana as a starting point, this study argues that coming to terms with the seeming paradoxes of liberal violence spurred nineteenth-century writers to generate new modes of literary representation, formal innovations able to account for the fact that their modern liberal society had the threat of death coiled at its very heart.
No single year of Victoria's reign, 1837-1901, was without at least one imperial war. Taking the permanent war of the Pax Victoriana as a starting point, this study argues that coming to terms with the seeming paradoxes of liberal violence spurred nineteenth-century writers to generate new modes of literary representation, formal innovations able to account for the fact that their modern liberal society had the threat of death coiled at its very heart.