Project Abstract
My present research examines the ethics of hospitality as it relates to the aesthetic of the beautiful. Using the theories of Emmanuel Levinas and Jaques Derrida, I assert that feminine beauty is more central to the event of hospitality than has been recognized. For the host to claim to be at home with himself, he must first feel welcomed in the space over which he claims mastery. While for Levinas the feminine presence is allowed to remain Other and unknowable, in the work of the writers I examine, it is often aestheticized, controlling it and denying it the unpredictability of alterity. The difficulty is that the welcome by definition cannot be commanded. In the event, actual women used their place in the aestheticized home to create space for their own subjectivity and being at home with themselves began to act as host, welcoming the other into specifically feminine space. The result is the violent and carefully timed reentry of the masculine in an attempt to display its mastery of the feminine and re-assert itself as master. This work examines authors from Burke and Kant through the Romantics (Chiefly Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley) to the mid-Victorians (The Brontes, George Eliot, and the pre-Raphaelites) to examine the roots and results of the cultural phenomenon in question.
Education
Purdue University
Ph.D.- 19th-Century British Literature (romantic and Victorian) August 2003 Advisor-Arkady Plotnitsky Secondary Area-Theory and Cultural Studies
Dissertation: "Shelley (En)corporated: The Romantic Sublime and Middle-class Subjectivity in the Victorian Domestic Novel"
Brigham Young University
M.A.-English-Fall 1997-Fall 1999 Advisor-Peter Sorensen
Thesis: "A Stage of Her Own Devising: Recovering Joanna Baillie's Plays in Light of Her Theories and the Stage Practice of the Romantic Period"
Arizona State University
B.A.-English-Fall 1989-Spring 1996 Secondary Education Certification-Fall 1996
Publications
“Letting in the Jungle: Hospitality in Kipling.” Kipling in India: India in Kipling, Routledge 2021.
South Seas Encounters: Nineteenth-century Oceania, Britain, and America. Richard Fulton, Stephen Hancock, Peter Hoffenberg, and Allison Paynter, Eds. New York: Routledge, 2018.
"On the Overthrow of the Hawaiian Monarchy, 1893." BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Web. 2 December 2015
"The Pacific in Victorian Literature." The Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature (a peer-reviewed encyclopedia project). Dino Felluga, Ed. Vol. III. Southern Gate, Chichester, Sussex, UK: Wiley/Blackwell, 2015. 1241-1243.
'"Playing such a part as this': Sincere Acting and Tragic Posturing in The Return of the Native." Hardy SocietyJournal9.1(2013): 67-84.
The Romantic Sublime and Middle-Class Subjectivity in The Victorian Novel. Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge, 2005.
"Iroquois Sachems and Tattooed Maoris: National Identity, the Cosmopolitan and the Search for Sensis Comunis in Kantian Aesthetics." Litteralis 2.2(2003): 103-122.
"Shelley Himself in Petticoats: Joanna Bailie's Orra and Non-violent Masculinity as Remorse in
The Cenci." Forthcoming in Romanticism on the Net 31(2003).
Reviews
Review of Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era. Andrew Radford & Mark Sandy, ed. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. Nineteenth Century Contexts 32.4(2010): 387-389.
Selected Presentations
“Revising the Human: Thomas Hardy’s revisions, AI, and the human in the post-human age.” North American Victorian Studies Association, Bloomington, IN 2023
“How Do You Settle an Unsettled Settler?: Home and the Welcome for the Anglo-Indian in Kipling"s Kim.” North American Victorian Studies Association, Virtual Vancouver, 2022.
“‘I Mean to live’: Ethics and Novelistic Form in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. North American Victorian Studies Association, Columbus, OH, 2019.
'"The door sill on which men tread pitilessly:' Judaism, hospitality, and violence in Daniel Deronda." North American Victorian Studies Association, St. Petersburg ,FL, 2018.
'"Rome disappoints': Masculinity, Poetics, and History in Arthur Hugh Clough's Amours de Voyage" North American Victorian Studies Association supernumerary conference, Florence, Italy, 2017.
'"Letting in the Jungle': Hospitality in The Jungle Book" Kipling in India, Shimla, India, 2016.
"'D---d fine girl! ... but d---d sharp!': The Countess Blessington, women as hostesses, and the right to offer welcome in The Strange Case of Lady Blessington and Godolphin" North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Cana9a, 2015.
"Tracking Ethereal Atoms: scientific Analysis, the Aesthetic, and Epistemological Progress in Middlemarch. North American Victorian Studies Association, London Ontario, Canada, 2014. "The illegible Evidence of Hospitality in a Changing England: Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights.
North American Victorian Studies Association, Pasadena, 2013.
"Movement, Stillness, and Ethics in Alastor. North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, Boston, 2013.
'"Comanding a Beautiful Prospect': Independence and the Ethical. North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, Park City, 2011.
"'Moderat[ing] her expressions of pleasure in receiving him': Hospitality, Femininity, and Control in Wuthering Heights" Australasian Victorian Studies Association, Singapore, 2010.
"The Fight on the Home Front: Violence, Hospitality, and Beauty in Kant, Burke, and Shelley" International Conference on Romanticism. New York, 2009.
"She Took the Knife Deep in Her Heart, Even as I Bad Her Then': Beauty, Hospitality and Violence in the Painting and Poetry of the Pre-Raphaelites." North American Victorian Studies Association, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 2008.
Service
Coordinator of Composition
Brigham Young University—Hawaii, Fall 2024-present
Principal Organizer-North American Victorian Studies Association Conference, 2015 (Honolulu) Fall 2013-Fall 2015
Chair-Department of English/Lead-English Program
Brigham Young University—Hawaii, Fall 2014-Fall 2018
CV Last Revised 6/2024
