About
I’m a Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), where I have taught classes in British literature and culture of the Victorian period since 2007. I recently completed a seven-year period serving as a Co-Lead Undergraduate Advisor for the English Department, and during 2021-22 I was Chair of CSULB’s
Academic Senate. I have also held leadership positions in CSULB’s Curriculum and Educational Policies Council and in CSULB’s chapter of the California Faculty Association (SEIU 1983). I support the principles of
shared governance in higher education.
Education
B.A. Augustana College (IL), 2000, English and French with a Minor in Geology
Ph.D. University of Virginia, 2007, English Language and Literature Work Shared in CORE
Articles
Other Publications
“Arthur Machen’s Infinite Paragraph: Narrative Style and the Weird,” Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism 4 (Summer 2019): 87-109.
“Decadence and the Weird: Introduction” (with Dustin Friedman),
Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism 4 (Summer 2019): 35-44.
“Automata, Plot Machinery and the Imperial Gothic in Richard Marsh’s
The Goddess.” In
Richard Marsh, Popular Fiction and Literary Culture, 1890-1915: Re-reading the fin de siècle, edited by Victoria Margree, Daniel Orrells, and Minna Vuohelainen, 148-67. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018.
Melodramatic Imperial Writing from the Sepoy Rebellion to Cecil Rhodes. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014.
“Oscar Wilde’s Poetic Injustice in
The Picture of Dorian Gray.” In
Wilde Discoveries: Traditions, Histories, Archives, edited by Joseph Bristow, 212-30. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013.
“Haggard Criticism since 1980: Imperial Romance before and after the Postcolonial Turn,”
Literature Compass 8/9 (2011): 645-659.
“Imperial Melodrama in Wilkie Collins’s
The Moonstone,”
Victorians Institute Journal 35 (2007): 53-80.
Projects
I am currently at work on a book project titled “Cosmic Romance: The Universe in British Fiction, 1885-1930,” for which I received a National Endowment for the Humanities “Awards for Faculty” grant for the 2022-23 academic year. “Cosmic Romance” considers British fiction of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century that attempts to expand human awareness through a particular kind of narrative. Cosmic romances challenge conceptions of literary realism and the everyday via estranged points of view and conceptions of time that exceed the human lifespan. The book project brings a study of narrative technique to popular British speculative fiction that explored increasingly complex notions of the space and time of the universe.
Upcoming Talks and Conferences
At the 2022 virtual NAVSA conference, “Unsettling Victorians,” I presented as part of the Roundtable on Decadence, Race, and Empire. I was also a respondent at the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies in March 2022.
More recently, I presented on William Hope Hodgson at the July 2022 Victorian Popular Fiction Association Hybrid Conference and at the NAVSA 2022 “Just Victorians” Conference in Bethlehem, PA.
I’m looking forward to presenting work on M. P. Shiel at a Victorian Studies and Caribbean Studies roundtable at the San Francisco MLA Convention in January 2023. I am also part of a January 2023 zoom panel on “The Promise of the Cosmos” that will be one of the installments of the Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States (VISAWUS!)
Victorian Promises series of panels.
In fall 2021, I published a
review of Leslie Allin’s monograph,
Penetrating Critiques: Emasculated Empire and Victorian Identity in Africa for
Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies. More recently in August 2022, I
reviewed Alison Hedley’s
Making Pictorial Print: Media Literacy and Culture in British Magazines, 1885-1918 in
Nineteenth-Century Contexts.Memberships
British Association of Decadence Studies
Modern Language Association
North American Victorian Studies Association
Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States (board member, treasurer since 2018)
