Research

My book manuscript, “Impotence: the Anatomy of Passion, 1600-1800” discovers the generative potential of impotence within the eighteenth-century imagination. Out of the looming threat of sterility and enervation, the eighteenth century reconstituted the parameters of marriage, aging, adoption, and pleasure, as well as biological theories of organic life. From the Earl of Rochester’s infamous depiction of mistimed climax to advertisements for James Graham’s electrified coital bed, impotence literature captures how perceptions of social and biological life evolve as they move between philosophy, law, medicine, and science. For example, when I compare the conventions of theatrical performance to the anatomical investigations of the divorce trial, I reveal how that the litigants’ inner sexual lives become scripted into a series of readable surfaces that flatten out distinctions between sexual fantasy and memory. I show how the novels of John Cleland and Samuel Richardson, read beside the sexual panic wrought within Onania, or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, reveal how sociality can be attained not only through sympathy and fellow feeling, but through the proliferation of symptoms and physical sensation. Finally, I explore how science fictions uniting electricity and biology threaten the parameters of proper reproductive life, for they model how pleasure and progeny might be redistributed though diffuse, polyamorous networks.

Publications:

“Impotence: the Anatomy of Passion, 1600-1800” (Book in Progress).

“Always unguarded and often uncivil”: A Case for Lydia in the Lizzie Bennet Diaries (Article in Progress)

“The Body,” Jonathan Swift in Context, ed. Pat Rogers and Joseph Hone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Forthcoming 2023)

“The Impotent Husband: Debility and Discord in Ned Ward’s Nuptial Dialogues,” Unmanning: Castration, Impotence, and Emasculation in the Long Eighteenth Century. Ed. Anne Greenfield (New York: Routledge, 2020).

“Impotence Made Public: Reading Sex on the Stage and in the Courtroom,” English Literary History 85.2 (Summer 2018): 441-469.

“Generic Failures and Imperfect Enjoyments: Rochester and the Anatomy of Impotence,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 28.1 (Fall 2015): 59-84.

Recent Awards:

Outstanding Early Career Faculty Award, Department of English, Kennesaw State University, 2002.

Huntington Library, Three-month Fellowship, Summer 2019.

Percy G. Adams Prize, Southeast American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2019.

Annibel Jenkins Prize in Performance and Theater Studies, Southeast American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2019.

Library Excellence Award, Dean of Libraries, Washington State University, Spring 2018.