Courses Recently Taught
Undergraduate (half-year)
ENG 1027, “The Storyteller’s Art: Introduction to Narrative I”
ENG 2091/2092, “Great Books: Madness and Culture”
ENG 2200, "History of Theory and Criticism"
ENG 4060, "Imagination, Mourning, Technology"
Graduate (full-year)
ENG 9048, "Romantic Psychiatry and the Talking Cure"
THEOCRIT 9675, “The Psychoanalysis of Philosophy”
Research Interests
My fields of interest cover theory and criticism; British Romantic literature and culture; British literature, culture, and philosophy of the long nineteenth century (1750-1900); psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic theory, and histories of psychoanalysis and psychiatry; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophy; cultural studies and popular culture; American film musicals.
Current Projects
Romantic Psychiatry and the Trauma of Sensibility, 1789-1862: a SSHRC-funded project that explores how psychiatry and literature intersect in the diagnosis of psychopathology. The medical doctor Johann Christian Riel invented the term "Psychiaterie" in 1808, only three years after the poet-philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge named the term "psycho-analytical." These coinages suggest in the period a desire both to explore and to manage, to communicate and classify, the psychosomatic body. Psychiatry from the eighteenth century forward tried to rationalize and thus normalize this body's refusal to make sense. Romantic and post-Romantic literature's concern with psychology, mixing sensibility and sensation, the gothic and forensics, lyric and narrative, conveys a deep ambivalence toward the psychiatric expression of this body. Yet this literature's discursive force also conveys a psychiatric consciousness both self-fashioning and coercive.
Romanticism and the Psychopathology of Happiness, 1750-1850: a SSHRC-funded project that addresses cultural education and social welfare in the Romantic century. Shorter notes that early psychiatry's response to those who "did not fit into a picture of bliss" (50) was framed by an increasingly hegemonic sense of family values. This begs the question: did therapy produce happiness because it taught the mentally ill how to fit into society, or because it released them from its normative pressures? Roy Porter argues that the Enlightenment "translated the ultimate question, 'How can I be saved' into the pragmatic 'How can I be happy?" (22). Historian Darrin McMahon likewise notes that ancient notions of virtue, the ground for Christian training in a felicitous afterlife, ended up in the Enlightenment idea of a natural right to happiness. I trace how an earlier Enlightenment inducement to seek happiness secures itself via a vicarious pleasure in the suffering of others. I surmise that Romantic print culture saw the emergence of an imperative to be happy at the expense of a more complex understanding of how the psyche and feeling work. This pleasure principle, seeking to alleviate excessive agitation at any cost, radically compromises the liberal politics of British Romantic writing.
Get Happy! The Political Technology of Film Musical Utopianism: a book-length study examining American film musical utopianism as visual surveillance, a spectacle of and for a happy American society. Utopianism constitutes the genre's political technology, traceable to a post-Enlightenment emergence of the visual's hegemony and of a psychiatric management of good feelings that together produce Debord' 'society of the spectacle.' Film musical utopianism offers an endlessly deferred satisfaction that reproduces the effects of capitalism itself--an ideological production that the genre attempts to transform, naturalize, and thus wish away entirely.
Romanticism and the Emotions: an essay collection, co-edited with Richard C. Sha (American University), that foregrounds the Romantic contribution to our growing awareness of the centrality of the emotions, and takes advantage of recent critical work on the history of emotions to reassess the role Romanticism played in writing this history. From the development of psychology out of the spirit of Enlightenment medical advance; to Hume's insistence that the emotions were central to volition; to the rise of sentiment, sensibility, and sympathy, this collection explores the rich legacy of Romantic thought on the emotions. Contributors: Julie Carlson, David L. Clark, David Collings, Mary Favret, Joel Faflak, Jacques Khalip, Thomas Pfau, Tilottama Rajan, Richard C. Sha, Rei Terada.
Selected Publications
Books
(co-editor) Marking Time: Romanticism and Evolution (University of Toronto Press, 2013; under contract)
(co-editor) The Public Intellectual and the Culture of Hope (University of Toronto Press, 2012; under contract)
(co-author) Revelation and Knowledge: Romanticism and Religious Faith (University of Toronto Press, 2011)
(co-editor) The Romanticism Handbook (Continuum, 2011)
(co-editor) The Handbook to Romanticism Studies (Blackwell, 2011)
(editor) Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, by Thomas De Quincey (Broadview, 2009)
(author) Romantic Psychoanalysis: The Burden of the Mystery (SUNY, 2007; softcover 2009)
(editor) Sanity, Madness, Transformation: The Psyche of Romanticism (Toronto, 2005; softcover 2009)
(co-editor) Cultural Subjects: A Popular Culture Reader (Thomson-Nelson, 2005)
(co-editor) Nervous Reactions: Victorian Recollections of Romanticism (SUNY, 2004)
Journal Issues
(editor) Romantic Psyche and Psychoanalysis. Praxis (December 2008)
(editor) Guilt. Special Issue of English Studies in Canada (2007)
(co-editor) Deviance and Defiance. Special Issue of European Romantic Review 17.2 (April 2006)
(co-editor) Romanticism and History. Special Issue of European Romantic Review 14.2 (Spring 2003)
Awards, Honours, and Research Grants
SSHRC Aid to Research Workshops and Conferences (2011)
Academic Development Fund, New Research and Scholarly Initiative Fund (2011)
SSHRC Standard Research Grant (2010-13)
Faculty of Arts and Humanities Teaching Excellence Award (2008)
SSHRC Standard Research Grant (2007-2010)
Aids to Scholarly Publications Grant (2006, 2010)
Dean of Arts and Humanities Travel Grant (2005, 2006, 2010, 21011)
SSHRC Standard Research Grant (2003-2006)
John Charles Polanyi Prize (2001)
SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship (1999-2001)
Governor General of Canada Gold Medal (1999)
SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship (1994-96)
Links
North American editor, Romanticism section, Literature Compass
http://www.history-compass.co.uk/subject/literature/section_editors
Executive Member, North American Society for the Study of Romanticism
http://publish.uwo.ca/~nassr
Areas
- Nineteenth Century
- Literary Criticism & Theory
- Cultural Studies
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