Contact
Expertise Summary
My research and teaching has focused on three broad areas: the intellectual history of the natural sciences in the nineteenth-century United States, including the position of scientific thought and practice in the wider culture; the history of psychiatry and ideas concerning mental illness from the nineteenth century through to the turn of the twentieth century; and (in a new research project built around an intellectual biography of the radical poet, critic, and editor Joseph Freeman) the 'literary left' and Marxist intellectual life from around 1900 to the 1960s.
Teaching Summary
I teach on a core second-year module on American social and political thought from English settlement to the present, and a thematic second-year module on American Violence: A History. I offer a… read more
Research Summary
My research and teaching is focused on three broad areas: the intellectual history of the natural sciences in the nineteenth-century United States, including the position of scientific thought and… read more
I teach on a core second-year module on American social and political thought from English settlement to the present, and a thematic second-year module on American Violence: A History. I offer a final-year class on American Madness: Mental Illness in History and Culture, taking interdisciplinary approaches to understandings and experiences of mental illness and its treatment in the United States from c.1850 to the present.
Current Research
My research and teaching is focused on three broad areas: the intellectual history of the natural sciences in the nineteenth-century United States, including the position of scientific thought and practice in the wider culture; the history of psychiatry and ideas concerning mental illness from the nineteenth century through to the turn of the twentieth century; and the 'literary left' and Marxist intellectual life from around 1900 to the 1960s.
I have published several articles and book chapters on the history of scientific thought and the connections between science and print, epistolary, and literary culture in the nineteenth-century United States.
Past Research
Previous research has included a masters dissertation on the work and thought of the American historian Richard Hofstadter, and his relation to the New York Intellectuals and debates over liberalism in the decades following the Second World War.
Future Research
I am now working on an intellectual biography of Joseph Freeman, a Marxist critic and key figure on the 'literary left' in the 1920s and 1930s. I am also co-editing, with Christopher Phelps, a volume of essays on Marxism and America: New Appraisals (forthcoming, 2021).