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My research and teaching both focus on the literature of Victorian England and its intersection with philosophical thinking. I owe my interest in the Victorians to a course I took in college on George Eliot’s novels, which are still a lodestar for my work within and outside of the classroom. In recent years, I’ve developed additional research interests in film and contemporary fiction, and I enjoy integrating both into my teaching. I’ve also taught English classes about the idea of the sacred and the history of narrative omniscience at Villanova University and the University of Pennsylvania. 

Frequent encounters with realist novels—that genre of everyday life that the Victorians expanded and perfected—have led me to think about the broader significance of the everyday in the period. My current book project, Desiring the Everyday in Victorian Literature, examines the concept of the everyday as a pervasive, elusive object of desire in the secularizing nineteenth century. I’m interested in all that’s entailed in the deceptively simple directive to better attend to our everyday lives, both in the Victorian era and today. My work from this project has appeared in Nineteenth-Century Literature. 

I’m also working on an essay about the playfully philosophical perspective of the Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher. 

Outside of the English department, I love to hike, cook, garden, and bowl. I’m also a frequent movie-goer and a fan of baseball (watching and playing) and soccer (just watching).