I am a scholar and teacher of early and nineteenth-century American literature, with particular interests in revolution, slavery, psychoanalysis, historical memory, and the political forms of narrative. My work asks how literary texts register histories that nations cannot fully acknowledge but also cannot leave behind.
My books include The Traumatic Colonel: The Founding Fathers, Slavery, and the Phantasmatic Aaron Burr, coauthored with Ed White; The Haitian Revolution and the Early US: Histories, Textualities, Geographies, coedited with Elizabeth Maddock Dillon; and an edition of Leonora Sansay’s Secret History, or, The Horrors of St. Domingo and Laura.
Current Research
My current scholarship examines the afterlives of revolution and racial violence in American literature and public memory.
“Brown with Lacan: The Paranoid Real of the Revolution” considers how Charles Brockden Brown’s fiction represents revolution as a crisis of knowledge, interpretation, and belated meaning.
A second project, “Radical Memory, Strategic Forgetting,” studies the struggle over the memory of John Brown at Storer College and Harpers Ferry, with particular attention to Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Niagara Movement.
I am also writing The Colonel’s Architect, a historical novel set around the construction of the Gibson-Todd House in Charles Town, West Virginia.
Teaching
At Bucknell, I teach courses in early American literature, nineteenth-century American literature, literary and critical theory, psychoanalysis and literature, and the literatures of slavery and revolution.
My courses frequently combine literary interpretation with archival research. Students work with early printed books, historical newspapers, manuscripts, public monuments, and other materials that reveal how literary history is made, preserved, and contested.
Selected Publications
- “Brown with Lacan: The Paranoid Real of the Revolution,” Novel, A Forum on Fiction, forthcoming, 2026.
- “Antisemitic: Keywords Continued,” (with Keith P. Feldman, Emmaia Gelman, Glenn Hendler, Mark Levine, Brooke Lober, and Barry Trachtenberg) NYU Press, 2025: https://keywords.nyupress.org/keywords-continued/antisemitic/
- “Haiti and the Early American Imagination,” The Blackwell Companion to American Literature, Volume 1, London: Blackwell, 2020.
- “Arthur Mervyn, or Memoirs of the Year 1793,” Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown, Eds. Philip Barnard, Hilary Emmett, and Stephen Shapiro. New York: Oxford UP, 2019. 76-90.
- “Contesting Slavery in the Global Market: John Brown’s Slave Life in Georgia,” (with Stephanie Scherer) Atlantic Studies 16.1 (2019): 38-53.
- Essays in American Literary History, Early American Literature, and collections devoted to early American literature, revolution, race, and empire