Language and Information Sciences

Research Interests

My research has been concerned with understanding the American Renaissance in relation to European intellectual history. The guiding thread linking these two different traditions is a negotiation between the idea of freedom and the idea of the novel. By tracing the path paved by the mutual interventions of freedom and the novel from the European Enlightenment and Romanticism to such American writers as Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville, a new significance of the American Renaissance emerges.