Biography

I began teaching at the University of Rhode Island in 2004, having taught previously at George Washington University.  At URI, I teach courses in Victorian and world literature as well as courses on the literature of protest.

My first book, Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, and the Victorian Novel (2010), appeared in the Victorian Literature and Culture Series of the University of Virginia Press. In 2015, Penguin Classics published the translation I co-authored with Jonathan Loesberg of Eugène Sue’s 1843 blockbuster novel The Mysteries of Paris. I’m currently working on two new projects:  a translation from the French of Le Bachelier (The Graduate), a novel by the nineteenth-century author and revolutionary Jules Vallès, as well as a book about the compartmentalization of experience in Victorian culture.

Academic labor, freedom, and equity are very important to me.  I have served on the board of URI-AAUP since 2014, and as the chapter’s secretary since 2019. From 2018 through 2022, I represented District X as an elected member of the National Council of the AAUP.  I am currently a Contributing Editor to the AAUP’s Academe Blog. In 2017, I co-founded Tenure for the Common Good, a nonprofit organization that aims to engage tenured faculty in the ongoing national campaign for labor equity on college campuses. 

In my spare time, I enjoy playing a large brass instrument called a euphonium. I’m a member of the Extraordinary Rendition Band, based in Providence, RI.