Teaching Philosophy

Whether I am working with advanced English majors in an upper-division course or first-year students in the Pacific Seminar, my underlying goal is to facilitate students' growing awareness of themselves as intellectuals-people who use their minds to find connections, to read situations critically and historically, and to think about the relationship between literature and important questions that arise in the current moment.

To keep students engaged, I tend to deliver brief, extemporaneous lectures about our readings and discussions of literature, film, or other texts. I often ask students to offer brief presentations that pose observations, ask questions, or contribute knowledge and further context to our reading. I encourage student participation on multiple levels. For example, in some courses students formulate final projects, which demonstrate their abilities to design, organize, and carry out assignments that began as intellectual curiosities.

In all my courses, careful and close reading is a principal component of our work together. Sometimes the most fruitful class sessions have occurred when we have abandoned the task of "covering the material" and instead have yielded to the force of the words on the page, slowly reading and rereading, meditating on a single phrase or word-tracing its rich etymological and philological meanings. These have been moments of pedagogical and intellectual grace. 

As Edward Said reminds us in one of his final books, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004), philology was practiced by some of the most radical and intellectually audacious minds of the last 150 years.  It is this radical audacity that I hope to inspire in students.

Scholarly Interest

Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature, World Literature, Criticism and Theory, Law and Literature, U.S. Empire, Liberalism and Neoliberalism.

He has essayed on a range topics addressing transnational American studies, sentiment and security, the enforcement of fugitive slave law, as well as the role of humanistic literary criticism within the managerial models of the neoliberal university. 
His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the journals American Literature, Criticism,Telos, and Review of International American Studies (RIAS). 

He is currently completing Cunning Inventions and the Force of Law, a book examining the concomitances between nineteenth-century U.S. literature and the tactics of fugitive slaves within the context of international law and extra-territorial reach of U.S. power in the wake of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. 

 

His next project focuses on the development of managerialism and the literature of economy in the nineteenth century. 

Recent Publications:

"Enforcement on a Grand Scale: Fugitive Intelligence and the Literary Tactics of Douglass and Melville." American Literature 85:2 (June 2013), 217-246. 

"Edward W. Said, the Sphere of Humanism, and the Neoliberal University." The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said: Spatiality, Critical Humanism, and Comparative Literature, ed. Robert T. Tally, Jr. Palgrave Macmillan (Jan. 2015), 63-81. 

"Correlatives of Liberalism: Melville's Managers and the Microphysics of Security," a special issue on "Security & Liberalism" in Telos 170 (March 2015), 131-148.  

"Lines, Knots, and Cyphers: Concepts of History in the American Literature Survey." Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice. Spring/Summer 7:1/2 (2014), 1-28.

"From Sentiment to Security: Cugoano, Liberal Principles, and the Bonds of Empire." Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts. Forthcoming. 

ENGL 151: U.S. Empire
ENGL 151: Fugitive Tactics: U.S. Law and Literature
ENGL 125: Critical Colloquium - Critical Theory Seminar
ENGL 63: Masterpieces of World Literature
ENGL 53: American Literature after 1865
ENGL 51: American Literature before 1865
ENGL 25: Hunger Games: Dystopian Literature & Spaces of Capital
ENGL 25: Literature, Imagination, Criticism - Introduction to Lit.
ENGL 25: The American Gothic - Introduction to Lit.
ENGL 25: Batman, Bauer, and the State of Emergency - Introduction to Lit.
PACS 1: Pacific Seminar 1
PACS 2: Pacific Seminar 2
PACS 3: Pacific Seminar 3