I am a scholar of modernist literature, with a particular interest in T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and (perhaps above all) Wallace Stevens. My particular angle on modernism is the conspicuous interest of modernist writers and philosophers in the ordinary, aspects of which mark both breaks and continuities with the literature of the past.

My current book project, "Seven Types of Ordinary," explores seven facets of the modernist ordinary, guided by the hypothesis that this cultural turn is prompted by what I call a "crisis of normativity," with ramifications for both aesthetic and political life. I articulate this concept with reference to both recent work in the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory, and neglected strands of thought about normativity contemporary to modernism.

At the same time, this work contains a meta-critical element in that it posits a continuity between the cultural dynamic in which modernist literature and thought intervenes and our own time, a continuity that has been obscured by certain tendencies within the discipline of literary studies itself.