I am an associate professor in the English Department at Temple University, specializing in English and Scottish literature during what scholars now refer to as the Long Eighteenth Century (1660-1832), which includes the Restoration, the eighteenth century, and the Romantic era. I am also interested in discussions about the state of the academy and the value of the humanities, organizing academic labor (I served from 2017-21 as President of TAUP, the labor union representing 2500 faculty, librarians, and academic professionals at Temple), community-based learning, and the literature of Philadelphia. I teach courses ranging from the introduction to the English major to surveys of British literature to more advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in the Long Eighteenth Century. I established a Summer Study Abroad program in London in 2013, reprised in 2015 and 2017, with Scotland added in 2022.
I currently serve as Director of Graduate Studies.
I am at work on a book with the working title, Narrative of Value: What the Scottish Enlightenment and Scottish Romanticism Have to Teach Us About the Value of the Humanities Now. It offers new answers to the current tide of damaging attacks on the humanities. Recent defenses focus on the decline after the flush years following World War II into a corporate, STEM-driven university (Harpham; Donoghue) or go back only to the founding of the German research university in the early 19th century (Readings; Small). While helpful, these acccounts limit themselves by starting after the separation of the humanities from the social and natural sciences that has too often made their value claims mutually unintelligible, especially the willfully miscast contest between the humanities and economics (Mehta and Newfield). Narratives of Value begins instead with the Scottish Enlightenment and specifically with Adam Smith (chapter 1), who offers pluralistic and flexible accounts of value as he unpacks the overlaps and conflicts between moral philosophy, economics, and aesthetics. Yet, as the figure of the war-dancing African in his work reveals, his challenges to Eurocentric and other flawed hierarchies of value are hobbled by his view of race at this early moment in its modern formation. Both the strengths and the occlusions of these narratives of value shape the ensuing chapters. Robert Burns (chapter 2) uses the unruly drives of “gangrel bodies” to contest Enlightenment tales of improvement that sacrifice precious local cultures and the Scots dialect as well as sexual desire on the abstracting altar of progress, politeness, and empire, the last confirmed by the way his work used in India. In a similar vein, a computational analysis of the visible hands in the plays of Joanna Baillie (chapter 3) shows how she revises Smith’s central moral idea of sympathy and central narrative irony of the Invisible Hand, questioning their reduction of women to unreflective objects of aesthetic delectation. Gender roles figure differently in chapter 4, which tracks how Walter Scott revalues novel writing from a sign of effeminizing “Delilahs of the Imagination” to a respectable profession providing stories for young, male novel readers to safely indulge in while learning how to be proper subjects of a modern state and economy. Yet Scott’s own bankruptcy offers a cautionary tale about the limits of such speculations. The advantage of drawing on these rich and flexible narratives of value are illustrated in chapter 5, which surveys the current state of the humanities with a nod to my own experiences: vocational (research into personal statements for professional schools); global (teaching and researching in Nepal and at a “national minorities university”); and local (work on my home institution’s vexed relationship with North Philadelphia). The result: A defense of the humanities employing the legacies of the Scottish Enlightenment to insist on its moral, aesthetic, and economic utility without reducing it to use as constructed by the market.
A version of the chapter on Adam Smith is forthcoming in English Literary History.
I am the editor of Allan Ramsay’s The Gentle Shepherd (1725; 1729) as the first volume in The Collected Works of Allan Ramsay, which was published by Edinburgh University Press in the Spring of 2022. The Collected Works received a grant of £1 million from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The Gentle Shepherd is Ramsay’s best-known work; it went through over 100 printings prior to the 18th century and various versions were staged frequently throughout the UK. Ramsay himself is a central figure in laying down the conceptual and institutional ground-work of the Scottish Enlightenment. My current understanding of Ramsay’s view of pastoral and his remediation of proverbs and other traditional genres can be found in an essay published in 2018 in The Scottish Literary Review, “‘Hodden-Gray’:Pastoral, Enlightenment Re-Mediation, and The Proverbial Allan Ramsay” and another, “Some Pastoral Improvement in The Gentle Shepherd: Mediation, Remediation, and Minority” (Studies in Scottish Literature, 2021).
I am also in the early stages of directing a Digital Humanities site on The Beggar’s Opera (1728) by John Gay, an even bigger hit in British eighteenth-century theater and one of the most influential texts in British literature, sparking adaptations from Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera (1928) to Opera Wonyosi by the Nobel prize-winning author Wole Soyinka (1977) to Stephen Jeffreys’ The Convict’s Opera (2008). At the core of the site will be a scholarly edition of The Beggar’s Opera in TEI-XML and MEI-XML that will be enriched by audio and video clips of various performances, a glossary, and contextualizing essays on topics ranging from political satire in the 1720s to ballads and ballad collection in the era. There will also be a data-driven project mapping editions and performances over space and time, which inquires into the relationship between the stage and the page. The site aims to be a proof-of-concept for others interested in bringing musical theater into a digital environment. My collaborators and I have now posted the pilot site.
Many of my scholarly interests coalesced in Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from The Restoration to the New Criticism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Focusing on the motives behind and the effects of the sustained interest by elite British writers in popular songs, it revises historicist accounts of the establishment of what we know now as the canon of English literature. While ballads allow elite authors to draw tendentious distinctions between high and low and idealize both the folk and the literary, they also use ballads to imagine a common world in opposition to modes of literary commodification and the overpowering of readerly agency. Among the figures I consider and continue to be interested in are better-known authors such as John Gay, Joseph Addison, William Wordsworth, William Blake, and Felicia Hemans, as well as lesser-known figures like Thomas D’Urfey, Allan Ramsay, eighteenth-century Shakespeare scholars and progressive educational theorists in the early twentieth century. Tracing the appropriation of ballads by elite authors puts me into touch with other topics that interest me, including nationalism, lyric, the history of English as a discipline, and the relationship between literary form and history.
Since the publication of my book, I have continued to work on the relationship between elite literature and various forms of the vernacuar during the Long Eighteenth Century, contributing to The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Romanticism (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500-1800 (Ashgate, 2010), and A Companion to Scottish Literature (Wiley-Blackwell, 2024)
A pre-history of sorts to the history of value I attempt to narrate in my current book project can be found in an article recently published in The Scottish Literary Review, Spring/Summer 2012 “Second-Sighted Scot: Allan Ramsay and the South Sea Bubble.”
I have also built on prior work on Shakespeare and popular song as a contributor to two volumes, one in The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2013) .