I am currently an Associate Professor in the
Department of Comparative
Literature. I grew up in Cape Town,
South Africa and hold an M.A. in English literature from the
University of Cape Town. My M.A. thesis,
Binarism and Indeterminacy in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon was completed
under the guidance of the South African novelist,
J.M. Coetzee.
I came to the United States in 1985 and completed a Ph.D in Comparative Literature at the
Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
My teaching and research interests include 18th-century cultural studies in England and France, critical theory,
and postcolonial literature and theory with a particular emphasis on Caribbean and African literatures. I recently completed a book that explores the fortunes of sentiment in British poetry and aesthetic theory
after the Civil War. This project undertakes several interconnected tasks: it proposes to rewrite
the literary history of a particular period in English literature around the politics and literature of
Enthusiasm; it accomplishes this by revisiting and reconsidering early eighteenth-century aesthetic theory
as well as the poetry of two major poets hugely popular in the eighteenth century: James Thomson and Edward Young;
it explores the genesis and construction of moral authority through a variety of competing discourses
appropriated by poetry; and it traces the rehabilitation of languages of sentiment in the period
between the English Civil War and the American Revolution. Entitled Elations: the Poetics of Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-Century Britain, it traces the gradual transformation and muting of religious Enthusiasm, functioning as a vehicle for political discontent, into more socially acceptable forms as poetic Enthusiasm. The book was published by Stanford University Press in October, 1999. I am currently working on a new project that investigates adaptations of poetry and aesthetic discourse to imperial ideology in the eighteenth century.
I'm also developing a third project on postcolonial African fiction and human geography.
I've lived in the United States for nearly 15 years, where I'm still trying to make sense of American culture! I'm particularly interested in the ways in which peoples, cultures and nations tell stories about themselves.
