Professor, English
School of Humanities

literature and religion; literature and medicine, restoration and 18th-century british literature; literature of the supernatural and gothic fiction; history and/of fiction;

UCLA (1988-2004)
UC Irvine (2004-present)

My research interests include the literature and culture of the British Enlightenment, gothic fiction, disability theology, and medical aesthetics. My previous books have taken up topics as varied as the animal fable and the figure of Aesop in 18th-century England’s consolidating print culture, representations of Mary Queen of Scots and the problem of the non-historical, and the emergence of “atmosphere” as an aesthetic category in 18th-century literature. Most recently, I edited the anthology RELIGION IN ENLIGHTENMENT ENGLAND(Baylor 2017).
My current research grows out of an ongoing exploration of the intimate and living textual relationship between the deafblind memoirist Helen Keller (1880-1968) and the eighteenth-century mystic and scientist Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). "Novel Swedenborg and the Swedenborgian Novel" examines the novel empiricism that grew out of Swedenborg's embodied graphic and lexical practices. I trace their reception in the sensoria that emerge in the writing (and reading) of Keller, Poe, Le Fanu, James, Byatt, Balzac. The study ends with a consideration of the sub-sub-genre of "New Age" gothic as derived from Swedenborg's own textually grounded spiritual science.

I also have a strong secondary interest, by way of gothic literature, in so-called oneirocriticism: the study of dreams, especially as autonomous and transpersonal aesthetic practice and in light of their ambivalent history as admissible legal evidence in Anglo-American law.

Chancellor's Distinguished Teaching Award (2024)
SOH Teaching Excellence Award (2016)
ACLS Fellowship
UC President's Fellowship
NEH Summer Stipend
NEH Fellowship
UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award

“ ‘Strange Imagination’: Valentine Greatrakes’s Healing Aura and the Autobiographical
Impulse.” Biography 40 (2017), 425-59.

“ ‘Hairs Less in Sight’: Some Vibrant Ideas of Gender, 1714-1790.” In A Cultural History of Hair, ed. Jospeh Roach and Margaret Powell (Bloomsbury, 2018), 112-133.

“Dialectic of Bewilderment.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 31.3 (2019), 575-95.

“Speaking with Frankenstein.” With Johanna Shapiro. Journal of Medical Humanities (August 2020), 1-16.

“Milton’s Hair.” Organic Supplements, ed. Miriam Jacobson and Julie Park. University of Virginia Press: 2021. 220-246.

“Mourning Atmosphere: Mary Webb’s Alternative to Elegy.” Venti, 1.1. Fall 2020. 112-23.

“Dryden.” Oxford History of Poetry in English (Seventeenth Century), ed. Laura
Knoppers. Oxford University Press: Forthcoming, 2022.

"'The Endless Space of Air: Helen Keller's Auratic Worldbuilding." In IMAGINING AIR, ed. Tatiana Konrad (forthcoming, Exeter: 2023)

“Helen Keller’s Sense of Light.” Textual Practice. Forthcoming 2024.

“Reading between the Lameds: Smart’s Gothic Theology.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 57 (2024), 491-500.

“Fantasy and Fable.” In Jonathan Swift in Context, ed. Joseph Hone and Pat Rogers. Oxford University Press: forthcoming.

“Gothic Law.” In The Elgar Encyclopedia of Law and Literature, ed. Simon Stern and Robert Spoo. Elgar: 2024.

“Romancing the Placebo.” Science and Storytelling in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. David Alff and Danielle Spratt. University of Viriginia Press: Forthcoming, 2025.

RELIGION IN ENLIGHTENMENT ENGLAND (Baylor, 2016)

AIR'S APPEARANCE: LITERARY ATMOSPHERE IN BRITISH FICTION, 1660-1794 (Chicago, 2012)

MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS: ROMANCE AND NATION Routledge, 2000)

THE ENGLISH FABLE: AESOP AND LITERARY CULTURE, 1650-1740 (Cambridge, 1995)

(with Lisa Zunshine) APPROACHES TO TEACHING THE WORKS OF JOHN DRYDEN_ (MLA, 2013)

(with M.E. Novak) ENCHANTED GROUND: REIMAGINING JOHN DRYDEN (Toronto, 2005)

THE TRIAL OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS: A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY(Bedford, 2000)

Link to this profile
https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=5137

Last updated
04/21/2025