I am a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Loyola University Maryland where I teach courses in general and British literature.
I received my PhD in English literature from the University of South Florida. My primary area of study is 19th century British literature, though I read, research, and teach in many different areas. My first book, which I am in the process of submitting to publishers, is titled “Of That Transfigured World” : Realism and Fantasy in Victorian Literature. In it I examine the role that overlaid fantastic narratives play in the construction of meaning in the works of Dickens, the Brontës, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde. I contend that a primary, yet generally unremarked upon, mode of literature during the period intermingles realism and fantasy in ways intended to address epistemological concerns regarding the relationship of art to knowledge and the possibility of representing truth in fiction. The texts I examine contain a realist core that is overlaid by fantastic elements that most often come from the language used to characterize the core narrative, or from metatexts or paratexts (for instance stories that characters tell.) The fantastic in this way becomes a mode of interpretation.
I am currently beginning the preliminary research for my next project. My interest in epistemology and Victorian approaches to knowledge is currently leading me towards examinations of how the burgeoning fields of Anthropology and Comparative Religion influenced writers such as Swinburne, Pater, and Hardy. I suspect that ultimately this will lead me to an examination of linkages between these late-Victorian writers and Modernists such as D.H. Lawrence.
I received my BA in English and Philosophy/Religion from Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida in 2003. After that I took some time off from academia, but did not go far from education. I spent time working as an assistant to the director of the Academic Resource Center in Panama City Florida where I focused on teaching hands-on electronic research methods to undergraduate and graduate students. In 2005 I entered Boston College’s MA program in English where I received a teaching fellowship and graduated in 2007. I spent a year teaching at the community college level before returning to school in 2008 to pursue my doctorate at USF.
Some of my scholarship is currently available online here.
A few posts that will probably tell you a little more about me:
"Quickly, to the Panopticon!" 