Awards/Fellowships

  • National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship

  • Modernist Studies Association Book Prize Short List

  • American Council of Learned Societies Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship

  • New York Public Library Short-Term Fellowship

  • Whiting Foundation Fellowship (dissertation fellowship)

  • Fulbright Fellowship (Trieste, Italy)

  • Wollemborg Research Fellowship (Columbia University (declined))

  • Majorie Hope Nicholson Doctoral Fellowship (Columbia University)

I am the Andrew W. Mellon All-Claremont Chair in the Humanities at Claremont Graduate University. Before arriving here a decade ago, I taught in the Department of English Literature at Columbia University, where I received my PhD, and the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale University. My interests in modernist literature and culture are broad, comparative, and interdisciplinary. I am most concerned with thinking about literature as an expression of human communication shaped at different moments in history by media and the more abstract forces of politics and history. That is why over the years I have focused on the importance of maps, little magazines, and computational methods for literary analysis. These different archives and approaches have given me the chance to explore how literary works and literary systems get structured.

So far, I have written four books on modernism: Novels, Maps, Modernity: The Spatial Imagination (Routledge, 2006), The Cambridge Introduction to James Joyce (Cambridge, 2007), little magazine, world form (Columbia, 2017), and ‘Ulysses’ by Numbers (Columbia, 2022). In addition, I edited the Cambridge Introduction to the Novel (Cambridge, 2018), a collection intended for undergraduate students and general readers, and have published numerous articles in some of the leading scholarly journals in the field, including, most recently, one on Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis in New Literary History (Spring 2024). My research for these projects has been generously supported by awards from the Whiting Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the New York Public Library, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

For the past two decades, I have done a lot of public-facing writing as well for the Times Literary Supplement. This venue has given me a consistent platform to address literary and cultural issues for a broad audience. I have published dozens of long-form pieces on a variety of literary and cultural topics that include the Futurist centenary at the Guggenheim Museum, the opening of the Enzo Ferrieri archive in Milan, the twenty-fifth anniversary of Fredric Jameson’s book on postmodernism, the English translations of Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault’s experience with LSD in California, and reviews of works by Umberto Eco, Franco Moretti, Lynd Ward, and many others.