Research

My primary area of research is in 19th c British literature and culture.  I am currently completing a book entitled Middle-class Poverty: The Discourse of the Poor, 1832-1867 that deals with the emergence of middle-class identity through the production of the category of "the Poor."  I examine social-problem or industrial novels, journalistic accounts (Mayhew), philanthropic texts, and "blue books."

I am also working on an edited volume of scholarly essays on "revisions" or "reinventions" of Jane Eyre.  The essays discuss texts as diverse as Lady Audley's Secret and Rebecca, Turn of the Screw and Lucy, Mrs Dalloway and My Fair Lady.

In addition to 19th c British literature, I also work in post-colonial literature and theory with an emphasis on travel writing.  I am currently working on an essay women and cosmopolitanism in the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh's books In An Antique Land and The Shadow Lines. 

Selected Publications

• "Mutiny Echoes: India, Britons, and Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities." Nineteenth-Century Literature, 62 (1), June 2007; 48-87.

• "Masculinity and Gossip in Anne Bronte's Tenant.  SEL Studies in English Literature. 

• “Edwin Chadwick's Self-Fashioning: Professionalism, Masculinity, and the Victorian Poor.” Victorian Literature and Culture, 2004.

• “Michael Armstrong: Re-reading the Industrial Plot.” Frances Trollope and the Novel of Social Change. Ed. Brenda Ayers. Greenwood Press, 2002. 35-51.

• “The Dual Work of Wastes in Chadwick's Sanitary Report.” Our Mutual Friend Scholarly Pages. The Dickens Project, 1998. <http://humwww.ucsc.edu/dickens/OMF/1865.html>