I am trained as a comparatist. For me, this means that I work at the intersection of literature and philosophy.
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. It argues that Descartes’ philosophy in general and his ideas about “thinking” in particular can be read better or at least afresh if we attend to what makes the thinkable sayable. In his case, my book argues, it’s early modern poetry and poetics that help us grasp what thinking feels like and how staggering its representation in language can be.
I’m currently working on Literature’s Cause, a monograph about causality, accident, and ground in early modern rationalism and literature. Part of what, at present, seems to be the book’s first chapter — on the cause of madness — centers on Descartes and Cervantes. (Leibniz and others await.) A representative Cervantine piece of this project should appear in print in 2025 in an edited volume on Romance-language comparison. Read more here.
Meanwhile, an essay on trivial poetics and Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard” will appear this August in Modern Philology, and I’m currently finishing up a slow burn of an essay on Kant’s writing on theodicy that I hope very soon to relinquish to Readers 1 and 2.
A 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.
Recently, I wrote an essay called “Hand” on Leo Bersani and comparative literary method. For Crisis and Critique, I have written essays on overdetermination and bogs (in Freud, Dickinson, Goethe, and Heaney) as well as a piece on banality and the word’s etymological surprises.
This spring, I became series co-editor of Thinking Literature at the University of Chicago Press.
For the past ten years, I have taught at NYU where I have a joint appointment at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and, in the College of Arts and Science, in the Department of Comparative Literature where I am Director of Graduate Studies. While I was a graduate student, I taught at UC Berkeley and San Quentin State Prison.
I received my Ph.D. from UC Berkeley’s Department of Comparative Literature, and I earned my A.B. from Washington University in St. Louis where I double-majored in French and Classics.
I live in Manhattan with the designer of my website and a black cat named Rem Koolpaws whose contributions may be more difficult to discern.