McGill University
Department of English
853 Sherbrooke Street West
Arts Building
Montreal, QC H3A 0G5 CANADA
B.A. (Yale); M.A. (New York); M.A., Ph.D. (Stanford), Associate Professor
American Literature and Culture Before 1900 (especially "American Renaissance"); American Mass Culture of the 19th and 20th C.
Williams College.
- Principal’s Prize for Excellence in Teaching, 2009 (McGill University)
- Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Research Grant, 2006-2009
- Louis Dudek Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2007-08 (English Dept., McGill University)
- Lois Rudnick Prize for Best Book in 2001-02 (given by New England chapter of the American Studies Association)
- NASSA Teaching Award, North American Studies Student Association, 2005
- H. Noel Fieldhouse Award for Distinguished Teaching (given by Faculty of Arts, McGill University, 2003)
“Anticipating Aestheticism: The Dynamics of Reading and Reception in Poe,” in Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective, ed. Viorica Patea (2012)
“Hale’s ‘The Man Without a Country’ and America’s Postwar Crisis of National Belonging,” CRAS (Canadian Review of American Studies) (2012)
“The Image and Its Discontents: Hawthorne, Poe, and the Double Bind of ‘Iconoclash’,” Journal of the Short Story in English 56 (Spring 2011)
“Levity and Gravity in Twain: The Bipolar Dynamics of the Early Tales,” reprint of 1994 journal article, in Mark Twain’s Short Stories, ed. Harold Bloom (2011)
“Dr. Holmes: The Life in Conversation” (Harvard University Medical School, Fall 2009).
““Herman Melville, Cosmopolitanism, and Traveling Culture,” The Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville (2006).
"The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table," American History through Literature, 1820-1870 ( 2006).
“L’implicite, l’implication, et la complicité dans deux contes d’Edgar Poe,” L'Implicite dans la nouvelle de langue anglaise (2005).
"Conversations with Whitman," The Mickle Street Review (October 2004)
"A 'Traveling Culture': Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature," Annals of Scholarship (Spring 2002).
Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation (2001).
"The Old Order on the Threshold of the Modern: James, Wharton, Adams," in The American Century (1999).
"People Movers: Snow, Pound, Muybridge and the Stop-Action Arts of Consumer Culture," in American Modernism Across the Arts (1999).
Editor and contributor, Mass Culture and Everday Life (1997).
Read the book online.
"Defining the Oratorical Culture of Victorian America: Elocutionary Style and Political Stance in Walt Whitman and Edward Everett," Intellectual History (Fall 1994).
"The Art of Being Off-Center": Shopping Center Spaces and Spectacles," Signs of Life in the U.S.A. (1994).
"Opening and Closing the Conversation: Style and Stance from Holmes Senior to Holmes Junior," in The Legacy of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1992).
Nineteenth-Century Literature, Journal of American History, New England Quarterly, American Historical Review, Modern Philology.
Talks and lectures from fall 2009 to early 2012:
"Hale’s 'The Man Without a Country' and America’s Postwar Crisis of National Belonging" (Canadian Ass'n for American Studies, London, ON; Nov. 2009).
“John Singer Sargent’s ‘Traveling Culture’: Transatlantic Crossings, Expatriate Experience, and the Workings of a Cosmopolitan Aestheticism” (Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Nov. 2009).
“Beyond the ‘Talking Cure’: Dr. Holmes on Conversation, Medicine, and Psychology” (Harvard University; Nov. 2009).
“The Cultural Work of Metropolitan Conversation: The Saturday Club,” lecture at Harvard University, February 27, 2010.
“Portraits of Expatriate Experience: John Singer Sargent.” Lecture at Bibliothèque Anglophone, Angers, France, March 18, 2010.
“The Image and Its Discontents: Hawthorne in Dialogue with Poe,” paper for international symposium, “L’image dans la nouvelle de langue anglaise,” Université d’Angers, France, March 19, 2010.
“Speaking the Commonwealth: Oratory and Conversation as Competing Models of Public Life in the America of Emerson, Whitman, and Melville.” Plenary lecture for symposium, “The Humanities and Public Life,” Dawson College, Montreal, March 25, 2010.
“Revising the Role of the Cosmopolitan Woman Traveler: From Daisy Miller to Ellen Olenska.” Paper for panel on “James and the Women,” NEMLA annual conference, Montreal, April 9, 2010.
“Sentimental Nationalism and the Cosmopolitan Patriot: Hale’s ‘The Man Without a Country.’” Paper for annual conference of the ALA (American Literature Ass’n), San Francisco, May 29, 2010.
“John Singer Sargent’s Cosmopolitan Aestheticism: Portraits of Expatriate Experience,” American Library in Paris, Paris, Dec. 8, 2010.
“The Return of the Repressed: Poe’s Place in the Transatlantic Transmission of Aestheticism,” University of Zurich, Dec. 9, 2010.
“The Globalizing Lyceum: Bayard Taylor’s Travel Lectures and the Legacy of Washington Irving’s Cosmopolitan Vision,” keynote lecture at symposium, “The Cosmopolitan Lyceum,” American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA, Sept. 23, 2011.
“Beyond Aesthetic Tourism: Travelers and Locals in Sargent’s Self-Reflexive Subject Pictures,” plenary dinner talk at symposium, “Transactions: Transnationalism and the Formation of American Culture,” Brigham Young University Art Museum, Salt Lake City, Utah, January 27, 2012.
Two ongoing book projects on: cosmopolitanism in 19th-c. American literature (A Traveling Culture); the mid-19th-c. American "culture of conversation" (American Talk).
Book chapters forthcoming:
- “The Globalizing Lyceum: Bayard Taylor’s Travel Lectures and the Legacy of Washington Irving’s Cosmopolitan Vision,” in The Cosmopolitan Lyceum, ed. Thomas Wright (2012)
- “Writing between Worlds: Washington Irving and the Cosmopolitan Tradition in American Literature and Art,” in proposed collection, Cosmopolitans at Home and Abroad ed. James Hewitson.