Statement
My research centers around Victorian literature and the arts, and my recent work is pointed towards a book on "Victorian Visuality." My teaching interests are more varied: for instance, in addition to courses on Dickens, Wilde, and the relations between Victorian Literature and the Arts, courses on twentieth century literature, on drama and comedy, and one on "Jewish Writers" (that last related to my efforts to help establish and sustain Oregon's Judaic Studies Program).
Publications
This list begins with two books: Victoria's Year: English Literatuare and Culture, 1837-1838, Oxford University Press, 1987) and The Ritual of Interpretation: The Fine Arts as Literataure in Ruskin, Rossetti, and Pater, (Harvard University Press, 1975). Some representative essays over the past dozen years include "National Portraits," in Victorian Prism, ed. James Buzard, Joseph Childers & Eileen Gillooly (University of Virginia Press, 2007); “John Ruskin,” in the Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literary History (2005); “Illustrating Bleak House” in Approaches to Teaching Bleak House, ed. John Jordan and Gordon Bigelow (MLA, forthcoming, 2007); "Pictures from London: Illustration, Photography, and Poverty," Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Special Issue on 19th-Century Photography, 2001; "Dickens and Illustration," in The Cambridge Companion to Dickens, ed. John Jordan (Cambridge University Press, 2001); "Unstable Foundations: Ruskin and the Costs of Modernity," in Ruskin and Modernism, ed. Peter Nicholls (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2001); "Street Figures: Victorian Ubran Iconography," in Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, ed. C. Christ & J. Jordan (University of California Press, 1995). I also served as Guest Editor of a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Contexts (2001) on 19th-century photography, including essays by Nancy Armstrong, Jennifer Green-Lewis, Garrett Stewart, Alan Trachtenberg, and myself.