
Professor Emeritus
For CV click here
Teaching and Research Interests
- British Romanticism
- Detective and crime fiction
- History of science
- Socioeconomic and gift theory
Selected Publications
- Being Cool: The Work of Elmore Leonard (2013)
- Co-editor, Blackwell Companion to Crime Fiction (2010)
- Detective Fiction (2005)
- Sacramental Commodities: Gift, Text, and the Sublime in De Quincey (1995)
- The Self as Mind: Vision and Identity in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats (1986)
- “Race, Region, Rule: Genre and the Case of Charlie Chan,” PMLA (2007)
- “Pictures of the Mind: Iron and Charcoal, ‘Ouzy’ Tides and ‘Vagrant Dwellers’ at Tintern, 1798,” Studies in Romanticism (2003)
- “‘Cortez—or Balboa, or Somebody Like That’: Form, Fact, and Forgetting in Keats’s ‘Chapman’s Homer’ Sonnet,” Keats-Shelley Journal (2002)
- Obi: An edited online volume of taped performances and essays, Romantic Praxis (2002)
- “The Feel of Not to Feel It,” PMLA (2001)
- “Bang Up! Theatricality and the ‘Diphrelatic Art’ in De Quincey’s English Mail-Coach,” Nineteenth-Century Prose (2001)
- “‘I’m in the Business Too’: Gothic Chivalry, Private Eyes, and Proxy Sex and Violence in Chandler’s The Big Sleep,” Modern Fiction Studies (2000)
- “Elizabeth Bishop and the Wordsworth of Lyrical Ballads: Sentimentalism, Straw Men, and Misprision,” Romantic Praxis (1999)
- “Thomas De Quincey’s ‘Three-Fingered Jack’: The West Indian Origins of the ‘Dark Interpreter,’” European Romantic Review (1997)
- “‘If I Can Make it There’: Oz’s Emerald City and the New Woman,” Studies in Popular Culture (1987)
Work in Progress
- Book: Lyrical Empiricism, on crime fiction and dramatic monologue
Honors, Grants, and Awards
- Boston University Scholar/Teacher of the Year (2006)
- Best Article Prize, North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (2005)
- Distinguished Scholar Award, Keats-Shelley Association (2004)
- Best Essay Prize, Keats-Shelley Association (2003)
- Boston University Humanities Foundation Grant (2000)
- NEH Fellow (1990)
- Thomas J. Wilson Prize, Harvard UP (1984)
- NEH Planning Grant for Curriculum Development (1983)