Faculty Bios

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 ...