Ph.D., Princeton University
M.Phil., Cambridge University
B.A., Columbia University
Associate Professor of English
Ph.D., Princeton University
M.Phil., Cambridge University
B.A., Columbia University
18th-century British literature & culture; Enlightenment philosophy; history & theory of the novel; affect & cognitive studies; Jane Austen
NYU Golden Dozen Teaching Award, College of Arts & Sciences; Sarai Ribicoff Prize for the Encouragement of Teaching in Yale College; Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship in Religion and Ethics, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation; McCosh Prize for Distinguished Teaching, Princeton University.
My work primarily engages connections between theories of fiction and philosophies of emotions. Although my research centers on the European Enlightenment and eighteenth-century British literature, I am generally interested in historical definitions of interior life and how changing concepts of feeling articulate themselves as problems of narrative. Should, for example, all actions be understood as originating from invisible states? How can we (and why do we need to) prove the existence of such states in human and non-human animals? What kinds of violence does the search for inner life entail, and are there alternatives? My book, Failures of Feeling: Insensibility and the Novel, takes up these questions in a long trajectory from early amatory tales of the Prude to Jane Austen to Bartleby. In explorations of the impassive, nonresponsive, and desensitized subjects of literary history, I argue for the unlikely importance of unfeeling—or the absence of interior states—in the emergence of what we now call psychological fiction. My undergraduate teaching includes lectures and seminars on the theory and history of the novel, literature and philosophy, Jane Austen, experimental writing, and survey courses on Anglophone literature. My graduate seminars focus on the long eighteenth century and affect theories from Spinoza to Catherine Malabou. I am a proponent of collaborative, interdisciplinary teaching and have cotaught in the public humanities with Dipti Khera. I belong to an ongoing arts-based research group called Consent Lab (supported by a Bennett-Polonsky Humanities Lab Grant) with faculty, undergraduate and graduate students and principal collaborators Brigid Cohen, Rosemary Quinn, and Mimi Yin. I am currently writing a book called Jane Austen and the End of Life.