Victorian Studies Program

My interests focus on Romantic and Victorian poetry and prose fiction, though they also include narrative theory, poetics, literature and science, and science fiction. In all my research and teaching, I am concerned with the ways literary form influences readers’ intellectual, ethical, and emotional responses, and with the interactions of different kinds of forms across genres, media, and disciplines.

My first book, Narrative Means, Lyric Ends (Ohio State UP 2009), examines a variety of strategies through which four nineteenth-century long poems put narrative techniques in the service of lyric purposes. In the process, it places narratology in dialogue with poetic theory, and connects large-scale narrative structures with small-scale figures and rhythms. My current project, Narrative and Epistemology in Victorian Science Fiction, draws upon discussions of methodology in a range of scientific fields to argue that many nineteenth-century science fiction novels expose and defamiliarize the patterns of rational inquiry that underpin both narrative form and scientific investigation.

I have published essays in Narrative, Science Fiction Studies, Victorian Poetry, Dickens Studies Annual, and the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Poetry.