Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2002

Scholarly Interests:
British and American modernisms; twentieth century poetry; Irish studies; Literature and the Environment; W. B. Yeats

Recent Courses:
English 367: Modern British and American Poetry
English 363: Twentieth Century British Novel
English 400: Literary Criticism and Theory
Development of Western Civilization 201 and 202

Selected Publications:
"Roots, Routes, and Langston Hughes's Hybrid Sense of Place" (Langston Hughes Review, Spring 2004); assorted book reviews

Course Descriptions
English 367: Modern British and American Poetry
In a few short decades during the first half of the twentieth century, America and Great Britain witnessed two world wars, the first commercial airplane flight, women’s suffrage (in England), the popularization of radio and the automobile, and the emergence of the modern, industrial metropolis. This course explores how poets in Britain and the United States responded to their rapidly changing world. We will ask if modern life required a new, “modern” kind of poem; and if so, we will ask what makes a poem modern.

We will practice close reading and will focus on the formal and thematic designs of the poems we read, working from the assumption that in modern poetry, the very idea of form is under close scrutiny. Our primary text will be the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry; but we will also look at some poetic sequences, like T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues, in their original form, asking how themes and ideas can take shape over the course of a whole volume. Among the other authors we may read in the course are: Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, H.D., W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Jean Toomer, and others.

English 363: Twentieth Century British Novel
This is an upper-level study of major developments in the modern novel in Great Britain and Ireland.  Most of the material we'll be reading presses at the boundaries of what a "novel" is supposed to be. Many of our writers were moving away from realistic description and toward a more impressionistic rendering of subjective consciousness; toward describing, in Joyce's words, the "curve of an emotion." 

Since realistic representation is mostly what we’re used to, the novels we’ll be reading may seem a little unusual, confusing (but intriguingly so), or even, dare I say it, downright weird.  But that's ok: I like to think of these texts as exhilarating puzzles, most of which we'll never "solve," but all of which will repay the effort we expend in our puzzling. 

Our texts will vary from semester to semester depending on our thematic focus, but we will generally study some or all of the following authors: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, Elizabeth Bowen, E.M. Forster, Samuel Beckett, Muriel Spark, Pat Barker, Ian McEwan