Positions Held: Professor of English, Middlebury College
Vice President for Academic Affairs, 2004-
Dean of Faculty, 2003-4
Visiting Fellow, Harris-Manchester College, Oxford, 2002-3
Acting Provost, Middlebury College, 2001-2
Acting Dean of Faculty, Middlebury College, 2000-1
Associate Dean of Faculty, Middlebury College, 1998-2000
Associate Professor of English, Middlebury College, 1996-8
Assistant Professor of English, Middlebury College, 1989-96
Education:
Ph.D., English, University of Pennsylvania, 1989
Mellon Dissertation Fellowship, Dean's Fellowship, University Fellowship,
Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching
M.A., English, University of Pennsylvania, 1984
B.A., with Honors in English, magna cum laude, Wellesley College, 1983
Manuscript:
“Going Nowhere: Virtual Travel and Victorian Culture.” The ms. examines nineteenth-century literary and visual representations of travel (including novels, guidebooks, travelogues, advertisements, and panoramas) that offer themselves as “virtual” travel experiences in competition with emerging technologies of travel such as steamboats and the railway. It explores ways in which the forms of displacement and disorientation generated by new forms of travel in the nineteenth century presaged the contemporary disembodiment of information through computer technology.
Book:
Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
Articles:
“Accident or Murder?: Intentionality, the Picturesque, and the Body of Thomas De Quincey,” Nineteenth-Century Prose 29:2 (Fall 2002): 48-68.
"Rivers, Journeys, and the Construction of Place in Nineteenth-Century English Literature," in Steven Rosendale, ed., The Greening of Literary Scholarship: Literature, Theory, and the Environment. (Iowa University Press, 2002): 77-94.
"Effortless Art: The Sketch in Nineteenth-Century Painting and Literature," Criticism 41, 3 (Summer 1999): 349-64.
"The Picturesque Aesthetic and the National Park System," in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Harold Fromm and Cheryll Glotfelty. (University of Georgia Press, 1996).
"Cathy Johnson," in American Nature Writers, ed. John Elder, Vol. I (New York: Scribner's, 1996): 425-38; "Lewis Thomas," in American Nature Writers, ed. John Elder, Vol. II (New York: Scribner's, 1996): 919-931.
"'The Masquerade of Existence': Thackeray's Theatricality," Dickens Studies Annual 23: (1994): 259-86.
"From Schoolroom to Stage: Reading Aloud and the Domestication of Victorian Theater," in Culture and Education in Victorian England, ed. Patrick Scott and Pauline Fletcher (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1990): 125-41.
"'The Language of the Soul': George Eliot and Music," Nineteenth-Century Literature, June 1989: 1-17.
Book Reviews:
Review of Delia da Sousa Correa, George Eliot, Music, and Victorian Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), forthcoming in Victorian Studies 47.1.
Review of Barbara T. Gates, Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World (Chicago, 1998), Australasian Victorian Studies Journal 5 (1999): 182-4.
Review Forum on Realism, Representation, and the Arts: "Response to George Levine, James Heffernan, and Patricia O'Neill," Australasian Victorian Studies Journal 4 (1998): 148-50.
Conferences and Lectures:
“’A Prodigious Map Beneath His Feet’: Air Travel, Virtual Travel, and the Panoramic Perspective,” INCS (Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Association) Conference on “Nineteenth-Century Worlds: Local/Global,” London, July 2003
“Virtual Travel and Victorian Culture,” invited lecture, Oxford University, March 2003
"Travel and National Identity in Postcolonial England," paper delivered at GEMCS (Group for Early Modern Culture Studies) Conference, Dallas, October 1995
Chair, session on "Thackeray's London: The Imperial Culture of Vanity Fair," INCS (Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Association) Conference, Santa Cruz, April 1995
"Women and Music in the Nineteenth-Century Novel," invited lecture, Vassar College, February 1995
"Displaced Heroines and Empty Parlors: The Traffic in Pianos in Nineteenth-Century Fiction," paper delivered at GEMCS, Rochester, November 1994
Chair, session on "Imperial Tastes: Women, Gender, and Food in the British Empire," Ninth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Vassar College, June 1993
"The Uses of Landscape," paper delivered at the MLA (Modern Language Association) Conference, San Francisco, December 1991
"The Aesthetic World of Branwell Bronte," paper delivered at the Northeast Modern Language Association Conference, April 1991
"'Musical' Musicals and the Authenticity of the Self," paper delivered at the Mid-Hudson MLA conference, March 1989
Professional Memberships:
Member, Modern Language Association
Member, North American Victorian Studies Association
Member, Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Association
Member, ACLS/Teagle Working Group in Liberal Education