My research and teaching focus on late 17th- and 18th-century British literature, and, most recently, on poetry and poetics. I’m currently writing a book on John Dryden's translations of Virgil and Ovid. I’m most interested in thinking about translation as an early form of close reading and in how Dryden’s translations offer a window on the period’s conceptions of poetic form and the singular knowledge it produces. My other concern is to show how Dryden’s translations fundamentally revise our understanding of the neoclassicism Dryden bequeathed to the 18th century. I also have a longstanding interest in rhyme in 18th-century poetry. I’m interested in exploring why conspicuously rhymed verse became so dominant in the period and how the literary culture’s thinking about rhyme drew from a long history of ambivalent attitudes towards this formal device. A recent essay published in ELH explores this question in Dryden’s early dramatic verse.

While my new project addresses concerns that are primarily literary and formal, my earlier published work sought to situate 18th-century literature within broader philosophical, theoretical, and historical contexts. In 2017, I co-edited a collection with John H. Zammito, entitled The New Politics of Materialism: History, Philosophy, Science (Routledge). This collection of essays followed from a year-long Rice Seminar on the relationship between the “new materialism” of contemporary theorists like Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, Samantha Frost, and Diana Coole, on the one hand, and the historical traditions of philosophical materialism (e.g., Spinoza, Hobbes, Lucretius), on the other.

My first book, The Fringes of Belief: English Literature, Ancient Heresy, and the Politics of Freethinking 1660-1760 (Stanford, 2008), examined the complex relationship between unbelief and the external forms of religion in the writing of the Earl of Rochester, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope. I have published essays on topics such as the Enlightenment’s Cartesian-Newtonian legacy, Milton’s Paradise Lost and the influence of Lucretius, Milton’s reception and Spinoza, Rochester’s poetry and emergent conceptions of class, and the materialism of Richardson’s Clarissa.

My current teaching aims to bring the early traditions of literature to life for students and to help them appreciate these traditions and their concerns as both different and, perhaps, unexpectedly continuous with ours.