Welcome. I’m an assistant professor of English at Dickinson College; I research, teach, and write about twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature, especially poetry. I’m also interested in modernism, poetic theory, life writing, intellectual history, and contemporary Anglophone writing of all genres. I’m drawn to questions about how literature employs or affects quotidian experience as well as questions about those literary texts that fall between traditional genres and more ordinary discourse. My first book, The Poetics of the Everyday: Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse, was published by Columbia University Press in December 2009. My second project, tentatively titled A Correspondent Art: Epistolary Ethics and Lyric Subjects 1950-Present, will analyze the personal correspondence of poets in the latter half of the twentieth century, showing how epistolarity manifests an ethics that mediates between personal affection and political action.

In addition to my academic research, I write poems, book reviews, and the occasional essay about food. Before moving to Carlisle, I studied at Yale, Oxford, and the University of East Anglia, then spent three years at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Please use the links above to learn more if you are interested and please feel free to contact me with thoughts, questions, and suggestions.