Currently a professor of English at the University of Louisville, I teach and publish on a wide range of literature, most often British Literature from Shakespeare to the Romantics along with contemporary Theory.
As a theorist, my biggest influences are my teachers, Stanley Fish and Fred Jameson. As a writer of creative nonfiction, I would name Norman McLean, Robert Pirsig, Ernest Hemingway and Herman Melville.
Favorite Books
Today's desert island list: Shakespeare, Milton, the Romantics--esp Keats and Coleridge, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Hart Crane, Berryman, Lowell, Tom Sleigh. Theorists: Jameson's Political Unconscious, Lacan's Ecrits, Stanley Fish's essays, all Freud, Marx's Grundrisse, Barthes, Foucault, Zizek, Zupancic. Novelists: Flaubert's Sentimental Education, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Fitzgerald's Stories and The Crack Up, Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, Singer's Enemies: A Love Story, Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey, George Eliot's Middlemarch, Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, Roth's The Ghostwriter.
Favorite Authors
See right column
What I'm Reading
Pericles, Charles Nicholl's The Lodger Shakespeare, Alenka Zupancic's Odd One In
Much contemporary entertainment owes practically everything to Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. The play may not have exerted a massive influence on love stories or romantic comedies, but when it comes to entertainment that trades on special effects or horror, Faustus remains the unholy mother of all. It is equally responsible for the river of psychological case studies that followed, ...
With my co-editor Julia Lupton, I put together a special issue of Shakespeare Yearbook entitled "Shakespeare After 9/11" that should be out soon. The Modern Language Association recently aired a show as part of their "What's the Word series" on how the events of September 11th changed the way we read Shakespeare's plays about politics and leadership. Three contributors to ...
