Education
Teaching Interests
Over the years at Muhlenberg, I have had the pleasure of teaching in many areas. In addition to my primary field of Victorian British literature and science, I have also taught courses in gender studies and ecocriticism. I love to develop classes at Muhlenberg that are taught nowhere else and often cross traditional disciplinary boundaries, such as The Death of the Sun. A long-time reader of sensation fiction and speculative fiction, I also teach courses like gender, sensation and the novel and novel ecologies. I am very interested in how novels transform as we read them, meaning differently for different readers and in different moments. For example, Reading Austen explores Jane Austen's novels not only in her time but also in ours.
In all my courses, I am committed to exploring the ways literature opens up new ways to think, to approach the world, to pose questions and to train us in seeing other points of view. No matter what we may do after college, the capacity to explore ideas in reading and writing helps us become more astute observers, more insightful thinkers and more creative problem solvers.
Research, Scholarship or Creative/Artistic Interests
I am currently at work on a new book project, entitled Experiments in Novel Ecologies. This work further explores some problems I encountered as I was working on my first book, ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature in Science. In that work, I explored the ways the cultural conversation between literature and physics fostered the development of modern ideas about energy and entropy. I am now working on the ways these ideas about energy have contributed to our ideas about ecosystems even as they created cultural bars to sustainability.
At the same time, I am committed to addressing explicitly the question of how the humanities can and should contribute to the ecological problems that beset our world. Building on the premise that how we read shapes who we are and how we live among human and nonhuman others, I am working to develop ways to read that change our sense of ourselves in the world.