At Randolph College I teach the written expression of the United States, interdisciplinary studies, and transnational studies of the sea and of science in literature.

Beyond the classroom, I recently directed the Tenth International F. Scott Fitzgerald Conference (Baltimore, 2009), and currently serve on Board of Directors of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society as well as the Editorial Board of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review. As a scholar I tend to “follow my bliss” wherever the footnotes lead: when a great book drops a name, that name often leads off the page and into fascinating episodes of cultural history. My publications in 2012, for example, examine Nathaniel Hawthorne’s reaction to the celebrity of astronomer Maria Mitchell, the first American to discover a telescopic comet (in 1847); the impact on Fitzgerald of early “physical culturist” Bernarr McFadden, whose exercise demonstrations earned him multiple arrests for public indecency yet whose relationship advice tracts sold by the millions; the opinions Edith Wharton held of her own writing; and the singular achievement of Southern novelist Augusta Jane Evans, the best-selling nineteenth-century writer whose passionate Confederate convictions cost her nothing in readership yet everything in literary reputation.

Certain pastimes – scouring antique shops for flint glass and phrenologists’ heads, digging with the archaeologists at Jamestown, St. Mary’s City, and St. George (Bermuda), celestial navigation – inevitably find their way into my courses.