Profile

My work lies at the intersection of the history of philosophy, science, and literature. I focus on the question of what brings characters—literary and natural historical, human and nonhuman—into existence. 

 

My current book project, "Character Density: Late Victorian Realism and the Science of Description," examines the philosophical implications of the disarticulation of character from plot at the turn of the twentieth century. Focused on series of little-studied, late-career works by George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Olive Schreiner, and Walter Pater, the project argues for a theory of literature as a descriptive science that documents the circumstances, experiences, and practices through which character materializes. 

 

In addition to problems of description and characterization in the nineteenth-century English novel, my research interests include: German theories of will and drive (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wundt), questions of materiality and temporality in feminist and queer theory, and the history of the physical and natural sciences.

 

I have recently published in PMLA and Representations and am currently completing an experimental, excerpted edition of the South African writer Olive Schreiner's 1926 novel, From Man to Man; or Perhaps Only (with design by Minna Sakaria).