ahoy!

I'm an Elliott 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 broad interests in how texts represent and reshape our ideas about ecology, empire, gender, mobility, and social networks. I'm also a scholar of the "blue humanities," a recent interdisciplinary endeavor that analyzes how we imagine a world fundamentally and radically connected by water. I'm especially interested in the oceanic, my shorthand term for the overlapping material, political, and cultural systems arising out of maritime circulation and exchange.

In my research, I explore how the oceanic imagination shapes the form and content of the Victorian novel. My current book project, Reading the Oceanic, tracks how selected novels build storyworlds with the textual infrastructures that underwrite Britain's maritime mercantile empire in the long nineteenth century. I have also published several articles on pedagogy, covering topics such as how to organize a peer review workshop, how to teach multiplot novels, and how to design more democratic survey courses.

In the classroom, my students and I take up questions of connectivity to better understand the patterns and structures of life in a networked, globalized world. Through careful readings of literary and nonliterary texts, we enter into timely debates about topics such as climate change, social networks, gender and sexuality, colonialism, human-nonhuman relations, and artificial intelligence.

My teaching and research interests include...

• novels and/as networks

• oceanic studies and the blue humanities

• climate facts and climate fictions

• postcolonialism and life in the wake of empire

• mobility, risk, and maritime insurance

• material culture and archival theory

• strategic presentism and the long nineteenth century

• first-year writing, especially style and peer review

Ask me about...

• sea shanties and prosthesis

• Jane Austen and the quest for longitude

• Dickensian social networks and narrative systems

• Victorian cryofiction and the search for the Northwest Passage

• the Alien film franchise, Joseph Conrad, and J. M. Barrie

• the mid-Victorian "beard movement"

• the Universal Design for Learning guidelines

• sociograms and concept maps as reading tools

• teaching as collaborative storytelling