PhD University of Chicago, 2011
MA University of Chicago, 2005
BA Reed College, 2004
My research and teaching focuses on the novel form and the theories connected to it, combining a formalist investigation of textual mechanics with an interest in studies of gender, sexuality, race, and world literature. I focus primarily on British and Irish literature of the long 18th century, but with a comparative and transnational approach that invariably delves into other traditions as well. Before I came to Ithaca college, I taught at the English Department at Monmouth College in Monmouth, Illinois, for 5 years, and at the Program of Cultures, Civilizations, and Ideas at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, for 3 years.
My first book, Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature (published by Johns Hopkins University Press in August 2021) is about theories of the novel as a genre, and how it developed. I argue against the standard narrative of the novel's rise on two fronts, arguing that the focus on Anglo-French fiction, on the one hand, and realism, on the other, gives us an overly narrow sense of the novel's potential, and skews our readings of fiction from "other" parts of the world. I use close readings of pairs of books from Poland and Ireland, spanning the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, to talk about features of fiction that often get neglected in big-picture arguments about the novel as a form.
My second book — more like a pamphlet, really — is a memoir/essay about bookclubs called Reading Together, published by Ode Books in 2025. I talk about the specific kind of reading that happens in and for bookclubs (not the same as the classroom kind!), and the weirdness of being an English professor in a bookclub, and also some books I've loved thinking about with other people.
I'm currently working on a book about free indirect discourse in 18th-century and contemporary fiction.
I am jointly appointed in both Literatures in English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and teach introductory courses in both departments, as well as courses in eighteenth-century literature, and feminist fiction and theory. I'm currently serving as the Coordinator of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. In my copious free time, I also do some translation, from Polish to English. I have translated quite a few texts by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, including Sketches in the Theory of Culture (Polity 2018), Of God and Man (Polity 2015), and chapters in a 3-volume set of his work, and his memoir, My Life in Fragments (2023), as well as a book about Bauman's work by Dariusz Brzeziński.
You can check out my personal website here, including my blog, where I write about things I've been reading (or watching) lately.
(Some) Recent Publications:
Reading Together, Ode Books, November 2025
“Introduction: What is Strategic Generalization?” ECF: Eighteenth-Century Fiction 37.1 (January 2025)
“Ihara Saikaku and Eighteenth-Century Studies,” ECS: Eighteenth-Century Studies 53 (2024)
Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and World Literature Studies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021)
"Two Paths for the Big Book: Olga Tokarczuk's Shifting Voice", Genre 54.1 (Spring 2021)
Recent digital publications, book reviews, and public writing:
“A Twist of the Kaleidoscope: Three Cases for Literary Criticism,” The Point Magazine, February 2025
Review of Divine Days, by Leon Forrest, Los Angeles Review of Books, August 2023
Review of A Ghost in the Throat, by Doireann Ni Ghriofa, KGBBAR Lit Mag, October 2021
Courses Offered:
Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies
Jane Austen and Her Contemporaries
James Joyce's Ulysses
Approaches to Literary Study
On Not Knowing Yourself
Introduction to Graphic Novels
The Matter of Black Lives in the Long 18th Century