Faculty Bios

  I specialize in American women writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Inspired in part by my first career as a newspaper reporter, I have always been fascinated by the dynamic exchange between journalistic practices and literary work. My first book,   Front-Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Literature and Culture, 1880-1930 , argued that the gritty, male-dominated vision of newspaper work associated with the rise of literary realism in the United States obscured a vibrant alternative tradition of women’s reporting. That tradition featured not objectivity and detachment, but rather material embodiment and emotional engagement. The myth of objectivity (and I do believe it’s a myth) has grown even more interesting to me with the spread of texts generated by AI. My interest in women’s reporting led to my second book: the first edited collection of the writings of daredevil stunt reporter Nellie Bly, which was published by Penguin Classics in 2014. In...

 Welcome! My classes at Villanova focus on literary modernism, 20th- and 21st- century British and Irish fiction, and the relationship between philosophy and fiction. I am the author of  Modernist Fiction and Vagueness: Philosophy, Form, and Language  (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and co-editor of the volume  Eliot Now  (Bloomsbury, 2024). I am the editor of two clusters of essays on #MeToo, T. S. Eliot, and Modernism in  Modernism/modernity Print + (2019, 2020). I have also written essays on literary modernism, gender, and philosophy, published in  James Joyce Quarterly ,  Modernism/modernity ,  Philosophy and Literature, Poetics Today, LARB , the  T. S. Eliot Studies Annual ,  nonsite  and  The Cambridge Companion to European Modernism . I am a three-time lecturer and seminar leader at the T. S. Eliot International Summer School. My current book project,  The Love Song of Modernism , focuses on modernism and fa...

I teach and do research in the areas of post-1945 American and global Anglophone fiction, apocalyptic literature, feminist fiction and theory, postmodern theory, science fiction, and contemporary film. I’ve recently taught courses on literary theory, apocalyptic literature, and climate fiction. In my scholarship, I’m interested in literature about various forms of contemporary crisis. Most recently, I published a book chapter considering the ways very recent apocalyptic novels  center the experience of human vulnerability in terms that chime with Judith Butler’s work on this topic and make reference to 9/11 to do so.   Another of my recent essays concerns affective responses to extinction in literary trilogies by William Gibson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Margaret Atwood, and N.K. Jemisin.  And a third recent article focuses on the recurrent figure of the femme fatale in contemporary apocalyptic narrative. My most recent book,  The Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twent...

My field is contemporary Anglophone African and African Diaspora literatures, including African oral performance studies. I’m particularly interested in Caribbean folklore and literary traditions, African oral literature, drama, fiction, and postcolonial studies. My first book,  Folklore in New World Black Fiction: Writing and the Oral Traditional Aesthetics  (The Ohio State UP, 2007), examines the fiction of two Americans, Toni Morrison and Jean Toomer, and two Guyanese, Wilson Harris and Roy Heath, for the myriad of ways they call attention to the intersections between orality and literacy, especially in relation to African oral performance aesthetics.  As a long-standing member of the International Society for the Oral Literatures of Africa (ISOLA) and once served as the Society’s President, I have been privileged to have an active involvement in the exciting research going on in African oral arts. In 2023, Nduka Otiono and I co-edited  Oral Literary Performance i...

I teach courses on Latinx literatures and cultures. These courses focus on the social, political, and literary movements of the 1960s; the cultural politics of migration, citizenship, and bordering; and representations of labor, resistance, and belonging.  As a scholar, I have published three books. Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization (University of Arizona Press, 2013) was the first book-length study of contemporary Latinx poetry and the first to put U.S. Latinx poets in conversation with poets in Latin America. With the poet Claudia Rankine, I coedited the critical anthology of contemporary U.S. poets, Poetics of Social Engagement (Wesleyan University Press, 2018). My articles and essays on poetry, poetics, and Latinx literature have appeared in American Poetry Review, Aztlán, Callaloo, College Literature, Hispanic Review, MELUS, Poetry , and The Writer’s Chronicle (AWP), among other journals, and in edited volumes published the Universi...

I research and teach courses in literatures of the Americas to 1900, with an emphasis on the long eighteenth century. Within this capacious field, I focus on the intersection of Indigenous Studies and settler colonial studies, paying attention to how creators and communities appear in and mark written texts. I am currently at work on a monograph entitled, “The Care that Remains: Returning Ancestral Narratives in the Early Atlantic.” While the awful thefts of Indigenous ancestral remains in the nineteenth century have received important attention, this project turns to the narrative pre-history of such violations, tracing how settlers used texts like natural histories to erase Indigenous ancestral remains’ connection to place and kin. Simultaneously, I examine how these very texts continue to register descendants always caring for their ancestors, and moreover, how Indigenous writers use literature as a crucial space to care for ancestors up through the present day.  I am a co-creat...

I teach courses in creative writing and contemporary literature that address exile, noncitizenship, and mobility. My fields of research and writing are exile, Tibetan nationalism, Literature of the Himalayas, and postcolonial literature and theory (with a focus on South Asia). I'm currently working on a book titled Thirteen: From Tribes to Nation . As many as 80,000 Tibetans fled into India and Nepal in 1959 with the occupation of Tibet by China. Based in Dharamsala, India, the Tibetan Government-in-Exile, represents Tibetans in exile and the national struggle for recognition. I examine the production of Tibetan identity and national narratives in the early years of Tibetan exilic life (1960's-70s). I focus on two political groups and visions: the dominant vision of the exile government represented by a political organization called the Tibetan United Association and the marginal and less popular one of predominantly Eastern Tibetan individuals whose leaders represe...

I teach 19th and 20th century African American literature, including fugitive slave narratives, contemporary novels of slavery, works of the Harlem Renaissance, the African American short story and the works of Toni Morrison and August Wilson. (I am pictured standing in front of August Wilson’s childhood home in Pittsburgh, PA!!) While my teaching range is somewhat broad, my research interests are focused on the narrative and cultural productions of black women preachers. In 2016, I published a critical edition of the autobiography of the Rev. Mrs. Charlotte Riley, an AME preacher born into South Carolina slavery: A Mysterious Life and Calling . My current book project, On the Threshing Floor: Representations of African American Women’s Piety , traces the image of the pious black woman, whom I define as dedicated to enacting and promoting the tenets of Protestant Christianity, as both an historical and a cultural figure from her appearance in autobiographical and expository writing...

I teach courses in American literature and culture as well as gender, trans, and queer studies. My research focuses on nineteenth-century U.S. literary histories, with a particular focus on white supremacy and antiblackness, genre and genre criticism, and trans and queer studies. My first book, Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States , came out in 2019 with OUP’s Oxford Studies in American Literary History series. I also edited The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body (2022) and, with Timothy Griffiths, I co-edited a special issue of Legacy, “ American Women’s Writing & the Genealogies of Queer Thought ,” which came out summer 2020. My articles have appeared in Transgender Studies Quarterly , American Literature , American Literary History , The Edith Wharton Review , ESQ , The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian American Literature , and History of the Present , among others.

I teach courses on Restoration, eighteenth-century, and Romantic British literature. I have a particular interest in the history and theory of the novel, gothic literature, the history of science, medicine, and technology and its intersections with literary culture, material culture, and the history of sexuality. My book, Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain (Oxford UP, 2017), shows how eighteenth-century authors adapted the form of the novel to address the moral, social, and medical concerns raised by the new prominence of machines in Britain's Industrial Enlightenment. I am now at work on two new projects: one is about iconoclastic violence in the 1790s and the emergence of modern critique; the other is about the rise of design consciousness and the aesthetics of whimsy in eighteenth-century literary and material culture.

I specialize in Irish Studies, and my research generally follows the influence of colonialism and its effects in Ireland, Britain, and India. My book, “Marion Wallace-Dunlop and the Origins of the Hunger Strike” (SUNY, British Studies) traces history of fasting protests up to 1909 when Marion Wallace-Dunlop performed the first women’s hunger strike for suffrage.  The book is half family history and half textual history.  It traces fasting and protest traditions through a range of extra-literary texts: histories, judicial diaries, academic studies, newspaper articles, as well as the more literary genres of autobiographies, plays, novels, and poetry.  It is to come out in late 2025 or early 2026. At present, I am also editing a special issue of a new online, open-access issue of the American Journal of Irish Studies on “Sustainability in Irish Culture” with the Irish language scholar, Dr. Jonathan O’Neill.  I also have published a volume of poetry, Fell Hunger with Sa...

I teach and write about nineteenth-century English and Irish literature, drawing on critical race theory, colonial studies, queer and feminist theory to question assumptions about institutions, representation, and public politics. My book, Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels, and Nineteenth-Century Realism (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) rethinks the politics of institutions by reinterpreting the most institutional of literary forms: nineteenth-century British realism. Although realist novels, like institutions, mediate social life through a set of formal conventions and informal expectations, they also offer strategies for more capacious political imagining through their prevalent anachronisms. These anachronisms—untimely chronologies, obsolete practices, and out-of-date characters—unsettle the shared time of institutions and the consensus it fosters. Novel Institutions gives unprecedented attention to Irish novels by Maria Edgeworth, Charles Kickham, William Carleton, ...

My fields of teaching and research interest are early-modern poetry and drama (especially in England, and especially Shakespeare and Milton); adaptation studies; the history of material texts; intersections of media philosophy and literary study; and genre studies. My recent work on these topics has taken me into ecocriticism, digital humanities, and translation theory as well. My current major project considers the long history of media change and its impact on literary form. This book explores how John Milton's representation of Eve - and later writers' adaptations of Milton's Eve - engages these issues. Forthcoming articles include “Media, Mediation, and Milton’s Eve” (in Milton Today , a special issue of Milton Studies (62.2) and “The Idea of the Interface and Shakespeare’s Cymbeline ” ( The Routledge Companion to the Interface , ed. Paul Budra and Clifford Werier).   I am Subject Editor for Literature and Drama in English for the Routledge Encyclopedia of th...

Evan Radcliffe reading the Times Literary Supplement while traveling in Brazil, where he grew up. My field is Romantic literature, and my main focus is on the relation of this literature to the controversies around the French Revolution—in particular, the ways in which Romantic literature reflects and responds to the political and moral-philosophical debates of the 1790s, debates about such topics as patriotism, the value of local and family affections, the ideal of universal benevolence, and the ways in which traditions enable or constrict moral choices, topics which all grow out of eighteenth-century British moral philosophy.  I’m also interested in the role that narrative form plays in the discourse on these issues.  Most recently, the question I have been exploring concerns the vexed relation between fellow-feeling and justice, which I argue is entangled with the problems of resentment and revenge.  I’m examining philosophers in the British sentimental tradition ...

I teach, research, and write on post-1945 and contemporary U.S. literature with an emphasis on Asian American literature and history, coming from a framework of critical race & ethnic studies. I'm currently working on a book titled  Someone Else's War: Race, Empire, and the Korean War in American Literature.  The Korean War, long considered the “forgotten war” of twentieth-century U.S. history, has been the subject of a newfound wave of interest in American culture over the past decade. In my book project, I read contemporary American literary works, including novels by Toni Morrison, Chang-Rae Lee, Rolando Hinojosa, and Ha Jin, to trace the transformative effects of the Korean War and U.S. militarism in Asia on U.S. racial formations from midcentury to the present. Examining the war’s impact on policies and practices around desegregation and immigration, I argue that the Korean War heralded a new mode of liberal inclusion for racial minorities in the United States. Thr...

My primary field of study is early modern literature, with a secondary field in literature of the Middle Ages. My research coheres around a broad set of questions about how stories of violence are told and retold. I’m interested in the literary structures that organize and rehearse acts of violence, especially structures that rely on the audience’s recognition of an old death in a new form. In particular, my work looks at sixteenth- and seventeenth-century reiterations of historical, literary, and religious scenes of violence that are inherited from earlier models, be they biblical, patristic, medieval, or relatively contemporary. My work considers the forms reiteration takes in the context of discrete historical moments of literary production, considering how both sedimented and emerging literary structures exert constitutive pressure over historical events. These interests have led to two main projects focused on rather disparate literary materials. The first is a forthcomin...

Hunter undertakes the typical peregrina (pilgrim) activity of washing clothing at the end of a day of walking while on the 500 mile traditional medieval pilgrimage to Compostela de Santiago       My teaching and research focus on medieval literature and the reception of philosophical ideas in the Middle Ages. My book, Forging Boethius in Medieval Intellectual Fantasies , from Routledge Press, explores the reception of Boethius through the creation and reception of a thirteenth-century forgery that presented itself as a sequel to The Consolation of Philosophy . My current work looks at how early logic curriculum shaped the work of Chaucer. My interest in how cultural fantasies about the past and the present shape reception histories informs the courses I teach on Medieval Romance, The Fabulous Middle Ages, and Chaucer.  Courses: Chaucer; Medieval Romance; Literature of Heaven and Hell; The Fabulous Middle Ages; British Tradition, I. Publication: “Remena...

My teaching and research focus on modern American poetry, though my interests often lead me out from that center—both horizontally (into twentieth-century American literature and culture) and vertically (into the long history of poetry and poetics). My current book project, Bedlam & Parnassus: The Institutional Life of Modern American Poetry , begins by observing the historical coincidence that, from where they sat in 1950, both Ezra Pound and Elizabeth Bishop could observe the dome of the United States Capitol. What makes that coincidence fascinating is the stark difference in their circumstances. Bishop was serving a one-year term as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (the position we now call Poet Laureate); the view from her corner office was meant to signal her proximity to power. Pound, on the other hand, was an inmate in St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Criminally Insane. He would be confined there for thirteen years in order to avoid being prosecuted on tr...

My focus is on contemporary poetry and poetics, both as a scholar and practitioner. In the graduate program, I teach courses on contemporary poetry, documentary poetry, feminist theory, ecopoetics, and environmental theory. At the undergraduate level, I also regularly teach creative writing courses with a focus on poetry. I have published critical essays on contemporary North American poetry and poetics including essays on Louise Glück, Brenda Hillman, and Frank Bidart, and have contributed chapters to The Cambridge Companion to Post-1945 American Poetry, A Companion to Poetic Genre , and The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century American Women’s Poetry . I am co-editor of three collections of critical essays that focus on 21st century North American poets, most recently North American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Beyond Lyric and Language , with Kazim Ali. I have also published four full-length collections of poetry and a new book, Flood Plain will appear in January 2025. My po...