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Professor of English
Research and teaching interests
American literature from the colonial period through the 19th century; comparative American literatures; gender studies
Education
Ph.D., Harvard University, 1980
A.M., Harvard University, 1974
A.B., Oberlin College, 1972
Publications
Books
The Captive's Position: Female Narrative, Male Identity, and Royal Authority in Colonial New England. Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2006
Co-ed. with Andrew Delbanco, The Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. II. Univ. of Missouri Press, 1990
The Art of Prophesying: New England Sermons and the Shaping of Belief. Univ. of Georgia Press, 1987.
Essays
"Female Captivity and 'Creole' Male Identity in the Narratives of Mary Rowlandson and Hannah Swarton." Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas. Ed. Ralph Bauer and Jose Antonio Mazzotti. Univ. of North Carolina Press, forthcoming
"Prolegomenal Thinking: Some Possibilities and Limits of Comparative Desire." A Companion to the LIteratures of Colonial America. Ed. Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer. Blackwell Publishing, 2005, 9-23
"Hannah Duston's Bodies: Royal Authority, Domestic Violence and Creole Male Identity in Cotton Mather's Decennium Luctuosum." A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America. Ed. Janet Lindman and Michele Tartar. Cornell Univ. Press, 2001, 193-209.
"The Sovereignty and Goodness of God in 1682: Royal Authority, Female Captivity and 'Creole' Male Identity." ELH 67 (2000): 925-49
"American Puritanism and Mary White Rowlandson's Narrative." Challenging Boundaries: Women and Periodization. Ed. Margaret Dickie and Joyce Warren. Univ. of Georgia Press, 2000, 137-57
"Mary Rowlandson's Narrative and the 'New' Theories of Early American Literature." Amerikastudien/American Studies 26 (Autumn 1992): 250-63
"'My Own Credit': Strategies of (E)Valuation in Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative." American Literature 64 (1992): 655-76
"Mary Rowlandson and the Rhetoric of Ambiguity." Studies in Puritan American Spirituality (essays in honor of Sacvan Bercovitch) 3 (December 1992): 22-45
"Seeing Through 'Paul Pry': Hawthorne's Early Sketches and the Problem of Audience." Critical Essays on Hawthorne's Short Stories. Ed. Albert J. Von Frank. G.K. Hall, 1991, 203-19.
"'The Art of Prophesying': John Cotton and the Rhetoric of Election." Early American Literature 19 (1984-85): 249-67
"Veblen and His Reader: Rhetoric and Intention in The Theory of the Leisure Class." Centennial Review 29 (1985): 249-67. Rpt. in Intellectual Histories in Modern Economics: The Legacy of Thorstein Veblen. Ed. Rick Tilman. Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd.
"'Syllabical Idolatry': Benjamin Colman and the Rhetoric of Balance." Early American Literature 18 (1983-84): 257-54
"Spatial Relations in 'The Old Manse.'" ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 28 (1982): 154-66
Selected honors and awards
Sheldon Hackney Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Liberal Arts and Sciences, Tulane University, 2001
Newberry Library National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellowship, 1996
Mortar Board Outstanding Teacher Award, Tulane University, 1990
Ford Foundation ASCEPT Grant, 1991
Fulbright Senior Lectureship, University of Munich, 1991-1992
Current projects