About

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Houston, specializing in eighteenth-century British literature. My first book was The Making of Modern Cynicism (University of Virginia Press, 2007), a conceptual and cultural history of the cynic and cynicism between the seventeenth and nineteenth century in Anglo-British writing. With Laura Rosenthal, I administer and contribute to a scholarly blog, The Long Eighteenth (http://long18th.wordpress.com/) that discusses eighteenth-century literature, history, culture, along with pedagogical issues. For the last three years, I have served as the Director of the UH Center for Teaching Excellence (http://cte.uh.edu/). My next book will be a literary history of the year 1771, told from the perspective of the published and unpublished writings produced and read in four cities: London, Edinburgh, Philadelphia, and Kingston, Jamaica.