Having just published The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen (Bucknell UP, 2020), I have two projects that flow from thinking about the relations between the theatre and the novel in 18th-century England, neither of which focus exclusively on 18th-century materials. 

As Principle Investigator on a SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2020-22), I am working with a team to develop for narrative theory the concept of "situation," which has long theatrical roots and broad vernacular applicability across a range disciplinary contexts and in various media. We are looking at its explicit appearance in drama theory, screenwriting, literary and social theory of the 20th century, radio and television serial production (sit com), and the art world, and its implicit appearance in novels and films. 

I am working on a project about autofiction and autotheory in the context of the long history of the novel tentatively entitled "Me, Myself, and I." 

Education

BA Double Major  in English and Philosophy, Barnard College 1982
PhD in English, The Johns Hopkins University 1991 

Research and teaching interests

Restoration and Eighteenth-century British literature and culture
Gender and sexuality
Post-1945 American literature and media (esp. film and television) 

Books

Selected essays

Recent and forthcoming publications

The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the restoration to Jane Austen (Bucknell UP, 2020)

This Distracted Globe: World-Making in Early Modern Literature, co-edited with Karen Newman and Jonathan Goldberg. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. 

“Jonathan Goldberg.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Literary and Critical Theory. Ed. Eugene O'Brien. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. https://www-oxfordbibliographies-com.lib-ezproxy.concordia.ca/view/document/obo-9780190221911/obo-9780190221911-0090.xml

“Cooper’s Queer Objects,” Angelaki 23:1 (2018) 131-143. Reprinted in Queer Objects eds. Guy Davidson and Monique Rooney, London: Routledge, 2019.

“Wilful Walpole” in Walpole at 300 eds. Jill Campbell, Jonathan Kramnick, and Cynthia Roman, under contract at Yale UP

 

“Tragedy, Comedy, Tragicomedy and the Incubation of New Genres” in Emergent Nation: Early Modern Literature in Transition V. 2 of 3 vols ed. Elizabeth Sauer, Early Modern British Literature in Transition gen. ed. Stephen Dobranski (London:  Cambridge University Press, 2019), 66-79.

 

Other activities

Research related web links

courses 2020/21 and 2021/22

2020/21
Intro to Drama, ENGL 240/2
ENGL 470/4 The Honours Seminar, "Towards a Genealogy of Autofiction"
ENGL 640/4 "Towards a Genealogy of Autofiction"


2021/22

Fall: On sabbatical

Winter: ENGL 322/4 Restoration and 18th century Drama
A graduate course "Islands: setting, experience, environment"

Islands, in early modern and 18^th-century texts such as Thomas More’s Utopia, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, William Shakespeare’s Tempest, Henry Neville’s Isle of Pines, William Davenant and John Dryden’s Enchanted Island, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and countless later texts in the genre of the robinsonade, serve as laboratories for probing and/or reproducing the limits of the social world and maps for the relations it fosters and that which can be known about it. Some latter-day instances retain the association of islands with enchantment, though some explore disenchantment by establishing the proximity of islands to prisons. This course aims to survey both possibilities. After examining early examples of island literature, we will turn to selected latter-day texts, both literary and theoretical, some drawn from the reception of the Tempest in the Caribbean (Aime Cesaire, Franz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Michelle Cliff) and some rewritings of Defoe (Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” J.M. Coeztee’s Foe and Michel Tournier’s Friday or the Bones of the Pacific) in order to explore the concepts needed to theorize islands, including chronotope, ecology, and adaptation.