Assistant Professor, English
Ph.D., Yale University
M.Phil., Yale University
B.A., University of California at Berkeley
ENGL 349: Critical Reading
ENGL 351: Shakespeare
ENGL 368: Milton
ENGL 451: British Literary Survey
To be a teacher is to be engaged in the project of realizing ideas. After more than ten years of college-level instruction, I have come to understand my role in facilitating this project to be an exercise of three major imperatives: first, application of clear and consistent success conditions; second, frequent demonstration of good thinking habits; and third, careful cultivation of student engagement through a variety of classroom activities. Nevertheless, although the project of giving life to ideas may be described and refined, it can never be given final axiomatic form. I ask my students to exercise that same ethic, as we learn rules in order to break rules.
I specialize in seventeenth-century British literature and the histories of science and philosophy, especially the Presocratics, Renaissance humanism, logic, and hermeneutics. At present I am writing a book titled Great Idea: The Composition of Knowledge in the Age of Milton.
