UMass Boston

Atlantic Studies; literature of the American colonial and revolutionary periods and of the early Republic; multilingual U.S. writing

BA, PhD, University of California Berkeley
MA, University of California Irvine

• Co-editor, Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown, vol. 2: The Monthly Magazine and Other Writings, 1789-1802
• Intro. & co-ed., "Early American Women Authors Unbound," special issue of Women's Studies 2021.
• Ed., Cities and the Circulation of Culture in the Atlantic World: From the Early Modern to Modernism. Palgrave, 2017.
• Intro. & co-ed., Urban Identity and the Atlantic World. Palgrave, 2013.
• Co-author, "Early American Magazine Writing in and out of the Charles Brockden Brown Canon," Early American Literature
• “Slavery, Abolition, and African Americans in Brown.” In The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown. 2019. 302-17.
• “Circulating the American Revolution: The Atlantic Networks of Christian Jacob Hütter.” In Beyond 1776: Globalizing the Literatures, Cultures and Communities of the American Revolution. University of Virginia Press, 2018. 25–47.
• "An Unoriginal Modernity: The Novelist-Translator Friedrich von Oertel (1764-1807)." Edinburgh German Yearbook 18 (2018): 107–24.
• "Postcards from Waterloo: Tom Verlaine’s Historical Constellations." In Rock and Romanticism. Palgrave, 2018. 121-144.
• "Cultural Transfer in the German Atlantic: Brown, Oertel, and the First Translation of a U.S. Novel." In Transatlantic Literature and Transitivity, 1780-1850: Subjects, Texts, and Print Culture. Routledge, 2017. 171-194.
• "The Silkworm and the Bee: Georgia, Cognitive Mapping, and the Atlantic Labour System in Boltzius and Thomson." In The Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic Literary Studies. Edinburgh University Press, 2016. 17-30.
• “Christian Jacob Hütter’s Washington: An Introduction, Commentary, and Translation of the Work.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 60.2/3 (2015): 293–331.
• "'Self-Created Societies': Sociability and Statehood in the Pittsburgh Enlightenment." Sociability and Cosmopolitanism: Social Bonds on the Fringes of the Enlightenment. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012. 121-140.
• "A Massachusetts Yankee in Karl Theodor's Court: Count Rumford's Sovereign Benevolence and Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond." Symbiosis 15.1 (2011): 45-61.
• "Pitching Transatlanticism: Commerce, Race, and the Academic Marketplace." In Teaching the Transatlantic Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010. 1-19.
• "Romantic Federalism: Atlantic Republican Literature Between Cosmopolitanism and Confederation." Literature Compass 6.6 (2009): 1127-44.
• "Republican Centaurs." Early American Studies 4.1 (2006): 192-232.

Running the 2023 Boston Marathon to raise funds for the University of Massachusetts Foundation. Donate here.

• Department Chair of English, University of Massachusetts Boston, 2017-2021

• Barra Sabbatical Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies in Philadelphia, 2021-2022

"Sermons, Slavery, and Scandal: The Printed Worlds of Early Boston, 1660 - 1830." Exhibit for Boston Public Library, Rare Books Department, 15 July - 30 September 2009. Course documents, photos, and exhibit catalog.

Shorter Publications

• “Beyond the Clip: Critical Uses of Film in the Non-Film Course.” Human Architecture 6.1 (2008): 1–6.
• "Hugh Henry Brackenridge." The Literary Encyclopedia Online. 2009.
• "Virtue" and "Pierre Eugène Du Simitière." Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment. Ed. Mark Spencer. New York: Continuum, 2015.
• Essays on Franklin, Equiano, and Emerson for textbook on American literature pub. 2016-17. Essay on Equiano for textbook on British literature, 2017.
• "The Critical Force of Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Revolution." Review essay for Early American Literature, 2021.
• Single-title reviews of books on Atlantic and early American topics for The Wordsworth Circle, Eighteenth-Century Studies, The New England Quarterly, The Journal of American Studies, The Journal of the Early Republic, American Literary History Online Review Series, The Middle Ground Journal.

Teaching

Courses Taught

• ENGL 102 First-Year Composition
• ENGL 182G “Race” and Ethnicity in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature
• ENGL 200 Understanding Literature
• ENGL 202 Six American Authors
• ENGL/ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES 270GL Writing and the Environment
• ENGL 320 Memoir and Autobiography
• ENGL 351 Early African-American Literature
• ENGL 376 Literature and the Political Imagination
• ENGL 407 Colonial American Literature
• ENGL 430 Literature of the Atlantic
• ENGL 457 Colloquium on Careers for English Majors (1 credit)
• ENGL 458 Colloquium on the Art of Literary Reviewing (1 credit)
• ENGL 483 Declaring Independence: Origins of U.S. Literature
• ENGL 498/499 English Honors Senior Seminar
• HONS 290 Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Boston
• ENGL 602 Studies in Narrative
• ENGL 606 Print Culture of Early Boston (Graduate)
• ENGL 650 Colonial American Literature (Graduate)
• ENGL 652 American Romanticism (Graduate)
• ENGL 664 Literature of the Atlantic (Graduate)
• ENGL 697 Atlantic Utopias (Graduate)
• ENVSCI 498 Developing Boston Harbor Across Time Scales