I was trained as a Romanticist and received my PhD from the University of Michigan in 2000. I continue to write and teach about Romantic literature, politics, and culture, at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. I also teach undergraduate theory courses and Bible as Literature. In 2017-2018 I was Interim Chair of the Department of English; in 2018 I was the Leverhulme Visiting Professor of English at Lancaster University, England.
Romanticism has always interested me less as a historical period than as a set of conceptual and theoretical problems (involving subjectvity, selfhood, language, secularization, ontology, and political agency) that sometimes find purchase in other periods or styles. I have also published quite a bit in the burgeoning fields of secular and post-secular studies, and in the field of Religion and Literature. Finally, I have a long-standing interest in cognitive science, particularly theories of consciousness, and in the history of philosophy more generally.
I am currently working on two separate book-length projects. The first, provisionally titled Eternity's Demand, is a study of selfhood in literature and religion, with particular reference both to Romanticism and to the existential tradition from Kierkegaard to Sartre to Malick. The second is a book on the political possibilities of Romanticism, provisionally entitled Careless Steps. Reading Romanticism as a set of experiments in embodiment, this project will include chapters on panpsychism, animism, the commons, and walking.
I have been the Director of the Center for Cultural Analysis since 2019, but my association with the Center goes back to my very first year at Rutgers, in 2000-01, when Michael Warner directed a remarkable seminar on "Secularism" that would shape my work for the next decade or more. Some years later, I co-directed seminars with Jonathan Kramnick (on "Mind and Culture") and with Jorge Marcone (on "Objects and Environments"), both of which have continued to resonate in my intellectual life. In short, the CCA has been a central part of my own intellectual life and development at Rutgers, and my goal is to make that happen for as many colleagues as possible.
