My fields of interest include the novel, in its many sub-genres and variations, and its relationship with the philosophical thought of the Enlightenment. Persisting interest in Jane Austen’s work has helped me familiarize myself with the women’s writing of the long 18th and 19th century as well as theories of criticism.
In my research, I have often found myself pondering the legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment as well as Rousseau’s influence on British writers. I’m particularly drawn to the modifications that certain branches of Enlightenment philosophy underwent in the works of what we retrospectively call the Romantic era and how they continue to be discussed, reconfigured, and applied in contemporary theories of human society. This dialogical approach has guided my study of cosmopolitanism in the long eighteenth century, where I delineate the Enlightenment’s absorption and expansion of Stoic cosmopolitan principles.
After wrapping up shorter projects on the intertwined fortunes of cosmopolitanism and race, I am increasingly invested in researching the poetics of dispossession and repossession in the context of transatlantic slavery. This project homes in on the trope of the automaton as a fantasy of total obedient enslavement. Currently, I am tracing this trope’s appearance in genres as diverse as the eclogue, the jeremiad, the novel, the melodrama, and the secret history.
In the context of this ongoing project, I have been a Visiting Fellow at the Beniba Centre for Slavery Studies at the University of Glasgow and at the Centre for the Study of the Literatures and Cultures of Slavery at the University of Aarhus.