I am a comparatist working across literature and philosophy and early and late modernity. Within this broad terrain, my scholarship tends to fall into two major areas. The first is a theoretically-informed approach to early modern and Enlightenment literature and philosophy. My first book, Cartesian Poetics: The Art of Thinking, is an instance of this trajectory, as is a current project, Literature’s Cause, a monograph about causality, accident, and ground in early modern rationalism and literature. (Read more here.) The second area of my research is more widely and wildly comparative across theoretical frameworks and centuries. Notes on Clapping, the other academic monograph I am currently writing, is representative of this area of my scholarship. It is about clapping. I describe the project in greater detail here.
Meanwhile, two new essays will make their way into the world this December. “The Birth of Janus” (forthcoming from Critical Quarterly) is about Gillian Rose’s The Broken Middle, the figure of Janus, and Plato’s Symposium. “Advice for Clowns” takes on the surprisingly incendiary stuff of rhetorical delivery, clowns, and Kierkegaard (for the comparative literature issue of MLN).
Next year, a chapter on the will to madness (Descartes, Cervantes) and an essay on close reading and totality (Leibniz plays a starring role) are slated to appear. I am also working on an essay on duration in Perrault’s “La Belle au bois dormant.”
With Nan Z. Da (Johns Hopkins), I edit Thinking Literature at the University of Chicago Press. Books appearing this year include Frances Ferguson’s Records of Reward and Heather Brink-Roby’s A Wider Reality.
I have taught at NYU since 2014 where I have a joint appointment in the Department of Comparative Literature and at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study. At NYU, I am Director of the Advanced Certificate Program in Poetics and Theory.
I received my Ph.D. from UC Berkeley’s Department of Comparative Literature.
I live in New York with the designer of my website and a black cat named Rem.