ahoy!

I'm an assistant professor of English at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. Originally from southern Maryland, I've also lived and taught in Pennsylvania, New York, Texas, and Georgia.

I study British literature and culture in the long nineteenth century (ca. 1768-1914), with a historicist-formalist approach to novels and networks. I'm especially interested in the oceanic, my shorthand term for the overlapping social, political, economic, ecological, and literary systems arising out of maritime circulations and exchanges.

Working toward a more global view of what we traditionally call "Victorian" literature, my research considers how narratives engage with and register the impact of global networks, with particular attention to British maritime histories and imperial geopolitics. My current book project, Reading the Oceanic, traces the textual infrastructures that underwrite Britain's global oceanic networks in the long nineteenth century.

Similar lines of inquiry animate my teaching. Broadly speaking, my courses take up questions of connectivity to better understand the patterns and structures of life in a networked, globalized world. I train students to interrogate the politics and poetics of borders and boundaries, flows and frictions. Together we explore topics like empire, archives, mobility, social networks, and infection and engage with urgent debates about global issues like the refugee crisis and the Anthropocene.

My teaching and research interests include...

• novels, networks, and the long nineteenth century

• oceanic studies and the blue humanities

• climate facts and climate fictions

• empire and postcolonialism

• mobility, risk, and insurance

• material culture and archival theory

• first-year writing, especially style and peer review

Ask me about...

• sea shanties and naval logbooks

• the quest for longitude

• sociograms and network visualization

• the mid-Victorian "beard movement"

• the Anthropocene

• postcolonial protest songs

• teaching as collaborative storytelling