About
I research and teach nineteenth-century British literature at the University of California, Riverside. My critical interests include popular media forms and the history of medicine. My first book, Inventing the Addict: Drugs, Race, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature (University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), was well-reviewed in Victorian Studies and other journals. I am currently revising my second book, Media Dreams: Ephemerality and Mass Culture in the Nineteenth Century. My articles and reviews have appeared in PMLA, Victorian Studies, American Literature, Literature Interpretation Theory, Genre, Cabinet, and other journals. I teach graduate seminars on affect in the nineteenth century novel, nineteenth-century media and literature, and the writings of Walter Benjamin. Education
Ph.D. English, University of California Berkeley, 2002
MSc. History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, Imperial College, UK 2000
B.A. English and Creative Writing, Dartmouth College, 1995 Publications
“Before Rorschach” forthcoming 2017 in Amodern
“Affect and Logistics: Trollope’s Postal Work” Victorians: A Journal of Literature and Culture no. 128 (Fall 2015), 226-244.
“Holmes’s Pipe, Tobacco Papers, and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of Media Addiction” The Journal of Victorian Culture 19:1 (March 2014), 24-42.
“ ‘Du Maurierness’ and the Mediatization of Memory” Victorian Studies 56:1 (Autumn 2013), 31-57.
“Smoking, Reading, Daydreaming” Cabinet no. 51 (Fall 2013), 35-40.
“The Case of William Seabrook: Documents, Haiti, and the Working Dead.” Modernism / modernity 19:4 (September 2012), 737-754.
“The Dandy, the Soldier, and the Cigarette: Under Two Flags and the Late Victorian Culture of Smoking.” Nineteenth-Century Studies 23 (2009), 87-104.
“Dickens’ Queer Children” Literature Interpretation Theory (2009) 20: 141-57.
“Impostors of Freedom: Southern White Manhood and Hypodermic Morphine in E.P. Roe’s Without A Home.” American Literature 80:3 (September 2008), 527-554.
“Victorian Hallucinogens.” Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net (February 2008).Special Issue #49: Interdisciplinarity and the Body at http://www.ron.umontreal.ca/
“Pioneering Inner Space: Drug Autobiography and Manifest Destiny.”
PMLA Special Issue “Remapping Genre” ed. Wai-Chee Dimock and Bruce Robbins. 122:5 (October 2007), 1531-1547.
“Queering the Drug Diary:
Go Ask Alice and its Victorian Genealogies.”
Genre 39:1 (spring 2006), 89-114.
“ ‘How far am I responsible?’: Women and Morphinomania in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain.” Victorian Studies 48:1 (autumn 2005), 59-81.
Projects
Media Dreams: Ephemerality, Mass Culture, and Material Practice in the Nineteenth Century (book)
Ephemera and Ephemerality (special issue of
Amodern coedited with Priti Joshi)
“Habitual Media, 1800-1920” forthcoming in
The Bloomsbury Cultural History of the Media
Upcoming Talks and Conferences
“Mass Culture, Character, and Projective Techniques.” Modernist Studies Association
Conference, Pasadena, November 2016
“‘Miss X’: Telepathy and the Affective Public Sphere.” North American Victorian Studies
Association Conference, Phoenix, November 2016
Memberships
MLA
NAVSA
