Vassar College Department of English

Faculty

My book, Henry James’s Thwarted Love (Stanford 1999), speaks to my central interests in American and British literature of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, literary theory, gender studies, and history.  The book aligns biographical and textual readings with specific topics in intellectual and cultural history, placing the novelist and his works within the key discursive frameworks that emerged during his lifetime: mental hygiene, sexology, psychology, and anthropology.

I am attentive to the situation of the literary work and consistently strive to reveal the contemporary (in many cases that means 19^th century) understanding of class, race, money, modernity, and so forth. Hence, you can attend a class on Edith Wharton and expect to hear about Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Lei\sure Class.  This means that in my survey of American literature 1865-1920, you will be reading W.E.B Dubois’s The Souls of Black Folk as much for his framing of ‘double-consciousness’ as for his style and method. I consider myself a close reader in spite of these extra-curricular interests.

I have published fairly widely on Henry James (on film, attitudes towards modernity, and the city), but am now working on a book on male celebrity and homoeroticism in the lives and works of British Pre-Raphaelite painters, critics, and writers. The book has a media studies slant—how the Fleshly School Controversy contributed to the fame of a small and obscure group of writer-artists, attacked by conservatives complaining of immorality and vaunted by a vocal male coterie. My aim is to demonstrate that Oscar Wilde had models; this book is about them.

My education: UC Berkeley undergraduate; Ph.D and M.A., Columbia University.

I consider that my education is continuing…