简介

While the main focus of my teaching and research has been nineteenth century British literature, I am drawn to authors who live on the edges of that century—Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde –and in recent years I’ve developed an interest in film. I’m currently working on a book on the Bildungsroman and its afterlife in film, and have developed a particular interest in the films of John Schlesinger. In addition to standard courses in nineteenth century British literature, I recently developed two courses that continue to engage me: “The Question of the Real in Fiction and Film”, which explores conceptions of the ‘real’ in both highly realistic and fantastical works of fiction (Chekhov, Poe, Tolstoy, Kafka) together with German Expressionist and Italian Neoreal films, and “Home and World,” a course that considers the changing relations between home and world in a wide selection of works including the paintings of Vermeer, major English novelists, films about cosmopolitanism such as Satyajit Ray’s “The Stranger,” and contemporary fiction with global concerns, such as that of Mohsin Hamid. Last but not least, I’m interested in developing a more critical awareness of the state of the academy today—for example, its growing dependence on informational apparatuses, such as the one you are now reading, rather than on intellectual inquiry.