I am an associate professor of German and co-director of WPI’s Berlin Project Center.  

My research centers on questions at the intersection of literature, religion, aesthetics, and politics, especially between the late eighteenth century and the present. In general, I'm interested in how religious and mythic material survives and transmutes across time, media, and language. In 2022, I published Dante in Deutschland: An Itinerary of Romantic Myth (Bucknell), a work of literary and intellectual history that pins the troubled fate of German Romanticism to its reception of Dante. 

My research has always been comparative, but these days it tends to focus on contemporary writers and their entanglements with the past. I am at work on a book that charts a network of writers, ca. 1990 to 2020, and explores how they conceptualize fiction as a discursive alternative to theodicy. Strands of the project--on Elena Ferrante and Jonathan Franzen--have been published in Public Seminar and Modern Language Quarterly.

Beyond teaching and writing, I am on the executive board of WPI’s AAUP chapter and committed to promoting academic freedom and shared governance.