Center for Cultural Analysis Office

I was trained as a Romanticist and received my PhD from the University of Michigan in 2000.  I continue to write and teach about Romantic literature, politics, and culture, at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.  I also teach undergraduate theory courses and Bible as Literature.  In 2017-2018 I was Interim Chair of the Department of English; in 2018 I was the Leverhulme Visiting Professor of English at Lancaster University, England; and in 2025-26 I was Laurence S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.  From 2019 to 2025 I was the Director of the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers, an interdisciplinary humanities center that supports a series of lectures, workshops, seminars, and working groups.  At the CCA I am particularly proud of our work on Critical AI and of the work that we did on the SHELTER Project during the Covid pandemic.  My own reflections on those experiences can be found in a 2026 article on "The Humanities in Public."

Romanticism interests me particularly as a set of conceptual and theoretical problems (involving subjectvity, selfhood, language, secularization, ontology, and political agency) that sometimes find purchase in other periods or styles.   That sensibility is on display in my  two monographs on Romantic topics: The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (2007), and Unquiet Things: Secularism in the Romantic Age (2015), both published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. The first studies the ubiquitous presence of the argument from design in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, arguing that its cultural and aesthetic importance undermines the familiar equation of modernization with secularization. The second emphasizes secularism rather than religion as its primary analytic category, and proposes that romantic-era literary writing possesses a distinctive ability to register the discontents that characterize the mood of secular modernity.

As that description suggests, my work on Romanticism intersects with another primary area of study, namely the fields of secular and post-secular studies, the philosophy of religion (especially Kierkegaard), and religion and literature.  In these areas, I have published essays on Charles Taylor here and here; you can read my introduction to a special journal issue on "the secular and literary" here.  From time to time I chip away at a short-ish book on theodicy that is also an extended engagement with Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner.  At the moment, though, I am working more directly on a history of existentialism and religion that runs from Kierkegaard through Sartre, Beauvoir, and Fanon, into a variety of contemporary sites including autofiction, hip-hop. and film.  I think of this as a genealogy of what I am calling "existence after Romanticism," which is indeed the working title for the book.  You can read parts of this project in a 2025 essay in Novel.  

Finally, I also have long-standing interests in theories of consciousness, the philosophy of religion, and in the history of philosophy more generally.  You can read a paper on emergence theory here; a chapter on panpsychism appears here.  Eventually I plan to integrate these articles on consciousness into a book on the political possibilities of Romanticism, provisionally entitled Careless Steps.  Reading Romanticism as a set of experiments in embodiment, this project will include chapters on panpsychism, animism, the commons, and walking.  

In my spare time I like to hike, travel, and garden.  I am fortunate to have an amazing spouse and two remarkable children.