Ever since I escaped, with the help of the European novel, the repetitive routines of my parents' living room, I've been fascinated by the world-making power of literary texts. Their ability to transport you elsewhere by crossing divisions of spirit and matter, fiction and reality, intellect and sensuality is at the heart of my research and my teaching. Reading literature is for me not an immaterial game of consciousness in which one always remains one step ahead of the text. I see texts instead as dense collective forces, tangles of a complicated past that can't be entered and manipulated at will. Getting into a text is often a gradual, difficult process that requires close reading, re-reading, and extensive contextual reading. Perhaps that's why I got so attracted to the eighteenth century in graduate school. Eighteenth-century texts are at the same time alluringly familiar and utterly strange. While drawing me in, they consistently confront me with the limits of reading and understanding. Awareness of such limits makes me a strong advocate of reading across the disciplines, both inside and outside the classroom. My research has focused on the novel, law, political theory, family history, and the aesthetic. My first book, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property (2002) brings these interests to a re-reading of the eighteenth-century novel, which I see as centrally engaged with competing concepts of property and how they define the boundaries of the individual, of social community, and of political and economic systems. I'm currently working on a second book titled Mixed Modes and Bastards: The Value of Impurity in Eighteenth-Century Britain. It challenges the view that modernization is a process of differentiation by arguing for the importance of cultural and political forms that authorize themselves through an aesthetics of mixture. My work has appeared in a number of periodicals, including MLQ, ELH, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Studies in the Novel. My teaching is organized around similarly wide-ranging textual materials. Most of my classes cut across different genres, cultures, and disciplines. I have taught, for example, a class titled International Gothic, which not only examines the Gothic's fascination with foreign settings, but also the different forms the Gothic adopts as it crosses national and cultural boundaries from Germany into England and America (I have an MA in American Studies and maintain a lively interest in American literature). My graduate seminar Commodity Cultures is comparative in a different way. It blends theoretical material (from Mauss to Heidegger and Baudrillard) with political economy (John Locke, Adam Smith, Karl Marx) and literary texts, from Pope's Rape of the Lock (1712) and The Adventures of a Banknote (1771) to slave narratives. The comparative and translative thinking such wide reading fosters seems to me especially crucial to graduate students. I'm currently planning an introductory eighteenth-century class called The Economy of Love, and I'm preparing (frantically) for The Savage and the Civilized, a seminar that explores the dialogic relationship between the 'primitive' and the 'refined' in the eighteenth century. It, too, looks at the Americas, this time through the lens of Scottish enlightenment writings.

• L14 357: The Art of Poetry (SP2007)
• L14 565: Theorizing the Multitude (SP2006)
• L14 3524: Topics in Literature (FL2008, FL2006)
• L14 402: Introduction to Graduate Studies I: Research (FL2006)
• L14 3524: Topics in Literature (FL2008, FL2006)