For years my teaching and research was centered in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, and my books (The Imperial Dryden: The Poetics of Appropriation in Seventeenth-Century England and France, [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994]; "Onely Victory in Him: The Imperial Dryden," in Literary Transmission and Authority: Dryden and Other Writers, [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993]; and Fiction and Friction: Sex, Text, and Envy in Dryden's Comic Drama) examine the ways English playwrights’ reading of French poetry and dramatic theory reflect and refract national modes of appropriation. I also worked on and ran courses in the origins of the novel, and women writers of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century.
Yet after a Fulbright teaching American literature in Lima, Peru, my interests became more comparatist and less period-centered, and my teaching now ventures more widely across time, theme, and region.
Recent courses include
- “Sympathy for the Devil: Genesis to Rushdie”
- “Displacement, Artifice, Eros: The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov”
- “Ithaca: The Art of Place”
- “Around the Day in Eighty Worlds: Magical Realism”
- “Comic Novels of the Late Twentieth Century”
as well as single-author seminars on Milan Kundera, Don Delillo, and Laurence Sterne. I also teach survey courses in Shakespeare, Dramatic Literature, Renaissance Literature, Enlightenment Literature, and introductions to the Short Story, Poetry, Fiction, and American Literature.