Expertise

Scottish Enlightenment, Restoration and Eighteenth Century Literature, Romantic Poetry, Popular and Elite Culture, The Value of the Humanities

Biography

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 in the Department of English.

I am laboring 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 accounts 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 on Robert Burns, Joanna Baillie, and Walter Scott. The advantage of drawing on these rich and flexible narratives of value are illustrated in the concluding chapter, 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 was published in English Literary History and won the 2024-25 James L. Clifford award from the American Society of Eighteenth Century Studies for “an article that presents an outstanding study of some aspect of eighteenth-century culture, interesting to any eighteenth-century specialist, regardless of discipline.”

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.  

I am also 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. 

In January of 2025, we mounted the premiere of The Beggar’s Trio, comprising selections from The Beggar’s Opera, Brecht/ Hauptmann/Weill’s The Threepenny Opera (1928) and Latouche/Ellington’s Beggar’s Holiday (1946). I served as the dramatug, co-producer, and play-cobbler (playwright is too elevated a term, I think, for my labors).  It starred students from Temple’s Voice and Opera program, with musical direction by Steven Gross, stage direction by Kyle Metzger, and co-production and guidance from Prof. Marcus DeLoach, and received support from the Office of the Vice Provost of Faculty Affairs, the Vice President for Research, the Provost’s Office, and the Dean of the College for Performing and Cinematic Arts. The play was reprised on May 2, 2025 as part of the Lanter Theater’s Spotlight series.

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). 

Website

Selected Publications

• “Localizing and Globalizing Burns’ Songs from Ayrshire to Calcutta: The Limits of Romanticism and Analogies of Improvement,” ed., Evan Gottlieb, Romanticism and Globalization Bucknell University Press, 2014), 57-77.
• “Shakespeare’s Popular Songs and The Great Temptations of Lesser Lyric," The Oxford Handbook to Shakespeare’s Poetry, ed. Jonathan Post (Oxford University Press, 2013), 265-81.
• “Doing Genre” (co-authored as part of “Group Phi”), New Formalisms and Literary Theory, ed. Verena Theile and Linda Tredennick, foreword by Heather Dubrow (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), 54-68.
• “The Dramatic Situation’ and ‘The Imagined Community’: Tales of the Ballad from Philology to the New Criticism and Beyond,” eds. Joseph Harris and Barbara Hillers, Child’s Children: Ballad Study and Its Legacies (Wissenschafter Verlag Trier, 2012), 56-68.
• “Second-Sighted Scot: Allan Ramsay and the South Sea Bubble,” The Scottish Literary Review, Spring/Summer 2012 (4:1): 18-33.
• “Ballads and Chapbooks,” Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Romanticism, ed. Murray Pittock (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 13-26.
• Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007)

Courses Taught

• The Beggar’s Opera and Its Legacies (graduate)
• Senior Seminar: The Transatlantic Gothic
• Special Topics: London In/As Text
• Scottish Romanticism (grad)
• Introduction to English Literature, 1660-1900
• Introduction to English Studies