About

I’m professor of English literature and dean of the faculty of humanities and social sciences at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Cooper Union is a private undergraduate college providing professional degrees in engineering, art, and architecture. Since its founding by Peter Cooper in 1859, the Cooper Union has provided a full-tuition scholarship to every admitted student. Before joining Cooper in 2006 I was vice-president and publishing director at Routledge. I’ve had two careers, first as an academic publisher and now as a humanities professor and an administrator in a college evenly split between engineering on the one side and art and architecture on the other. As a humanist charged with leading the humanities and social sciences core and electives within Cooper’s professional programs, I find myself daily at the intersection of the academic humanities, the studio-based creative fields, and the laboratory-based engineering disciplines. My professional and scholarly interests include best practice in scholarly publishing, the history of the book, seventeenth-century literary and cultural history, and opera as a musical, literary and dramatic form.