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In Progress:
Making a World: Imperialism, Globalization, and the Geopolitical
Imagination in Britain, 1850-1950.
 Book-length project
seeks to develop a theoretical framework that distinguishes cultural
globalization from imperialism in the century from 1850-1950.
Argues that to begin to understand the differences among imperialism,
postcolonialism, and globalization as hybrid and related discourses
of difference and "complex connectivity" across the
world, we need to attend to the ways in which British and imperial
subjects alike apprehend or use exhibitions, displays, and books
that disseminate such tropes in the age of world empires and their
dissolution.
Book:
 The Novel and the Menagerie: Totality, Englishness and
Empire (Ohio State University Press,
2007) reviewed in Victorian Studies; MFS: Modern Fiction Studies; Studies in the Novel; The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies; Novel; Year's Work in English Studies; and Minnesota Review. Passing mention by Margaret Drabble in The Times Literary Supplement 19 Aug 2009.
This book explores
displays of the British Empire in nineteenth- and twentieth-century
England and their relation to the form of the English novel since
the mid-nineteenth century. The central questions the project
takes up concern the way the English represented to themselves
a global imperial culture and their place within it, and how the
novel as a privileged cultural form engages such modes of representation
in the work of authors ranging from William Makepeace Thackeray
to Julian Barnes. The Novel and the Menagerie is concerned
equally with analysis of novels and attendant nonfiction writing
by nineteenth- and twentieth-century English authors, and with
attention to popular cultural documents and artifacts from archival
collections, chiefly articles and images in the popular press,
limited edition commemorative albums, broadsheet ballads, and
"ephemera" related to imperial "zoogeography"
and exhibition. (NEW!: hear the podcast conversation about The Novel and the Menagerie in the Kelvin Smith Library "Off the Shelf Series")
Other Publications:
“Angela Carter.” (2000-word entry.) Blackwell Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction: Britain and Ireland. Ed. Brian W. Shaffer. Oxford: Blackwell, 2011.
 “Virginia Woolf and the Empire Exhibition of 1924: Modernism, Excess, and the Verandahs of Realism.” Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place. Ed. Michael Whitworth and Anna Snaith. (London: Palgrave, June 2007.)
 "Arnold Bennett." The
Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature. Ed. David
Scott Kastan. New York: Oxford UP, 2006.
 Guest Editor,
Globalization
and the Image. Special double issue of Genre: Forms
of Discourse and Culture 36.3/4 (Fall/Winter 2003).
"Of Blind Men and Elephants: Globalization and the Image."
Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 36.3/4 (Fall/Winter
2003): 221-238.
"Commodity Culture and Its Discontents: Mr Bennett, Bart
Simpson, and the Rhetoric of Modernism." In Leaving
Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional
Culture, ed. John Alberti. Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 2004. 29-62.
"Elephants in the Labyrinth of Empire: Modernism and the
Menagerie in The Old Wives' Tale," Twentieth-Century
Literature 49.2 (Summer 2003). 131-163. [Winner of 2003
Andrew J.Kappel Prize in Literary Criticism]
"Liberty, Libel, and Liber Amoris: Hazlitt on Sovereignty
and Death." Studies in Romanticism 38 (Summer
1999). 281-309.
"Alchemy and Appreciation: The Spoiling of the Real in Henry
James's The Spoils of Poynton." Studies in the
Novel 30.1 (Spring 1998). 35-49.
 "Excavating
the Elephant and Castle: Joanna Southcott and the Voice of Prophecy
in A Room of One's Own." In Virginia
Woolf and Her Influences, ed. Laura Davis and Jeanette
McVicker. NY: Pace UP, 1998. 98-104.
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