SCHOLARSHIP:

I'm a scholar of the long eighteenth century (ca. 1650-1800), in Britain and Europe, with interests in material culture, the history of science, cognition, and craft practices.  My CV.
 

SOME PUBLICATIONS:

PROJECTS:

Before Complexity: The Cultural History of a Modern Concept (manuscript in progress). This book traces the prehistory of six concepts important to the information age (information, contingency, complexity, emergence, accident, invention) as they underwent critical transformations in the literature and arts of the long eighteenth century.  We are living the legacy of decisions and insights made more than three centuries in the past.

Crafts of Enlightenment, workshop in progress.  We tend to think of the Enlightenment as the age of the triumph of Reason.  But historical forms of rational thought were developed through specific craft practices.  My ongoing effort is to recover the habits and practices of the architects of abstraction, including John Locke, Robert Hooke, and Joseph Addison.

TEACHING:

At Rutgers, I regularly teach courses on eighteenth-century literature, material culture, and the history of museums.  

A course entitled "The Novel and the Museum" was awarded the ASECS Innovative Course Prize.  As part of this class, students build a museum of literary objects.  The catalogue of this museum, featuring students' writing, is printed and published at the end of the term.  

I have recently launched a course called "Reading with Your Laptop," training students to program in R, and introducing them to half-a-dozen innovative techniques they can employ in the R environment.  Students work in research teams, authoring reports based on collaborative research.  What would literary-critical work look like if it was done in the sciences?  Together, we aim to find out.