Professor

After an early career in the UK (graduate studies at Cambridge; teaching at the University of Kent), I came to UNL as a Professor in 2003.

From 2005 to 2019 I was the General Editor of the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition, and also the General Editor of Cather Studies. In the latter capacity, I edited/co-edited (with my colleague, Melissa Homestead) three volumes of this specialist publication. My work on Cather also extended to a Bedford edition of My Ántonia, as well as directing three of the Cather International Seminars (the premier conference dedicated to her work). Alongside this research, I have also worked on internationalist/transnational aspects of American literary culture, producing Apostles of Modernity: American Writers in the Age of Development(2008). The latter focused on the post-war fiction, political writing and reportage by figures including Pearl Buck, Richard Wright, Peter Matthiessen, Susan Sontag, Paul Bowles and Malcolm X.

I published Sensing Willa Cather: the Writer and the Body in Transition in 2021 (Edinburgh UP). This is a body studies account of Cather's oeuvre, concentrating on how the senses (sight, touch etc.) are represented in her work, and then become the basis of narrative itself. The book is also an account of Cather's proto-modernist aesthetics, and an exploration of how she responded to what I call the 'disrupted habitus' of an America transformed by immigration, social change, and the emergence of new kinds of character (for instance, that of the female diva) into culture.

My current research focuses on post-war British fiction and history, particularly the prehistoric and medieval past.  Deploying archival materials from libraries in Scotland, England, Wales and the US, Britannia Revisioned explores the ways novelists such as Jim Crace, Kazuo Ishiguro, Raymond Williams, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Paul Kingsnorth have created compelling fictional accounts of Britain’s vanished pasts. The projected book aims to situate the contemporary historical novel as a major literary genre. 

A number of my essays and lectures, on Cather and other Americans, are available online via the ‘Selected Works’ electronic press.

Selected Publications and Projects

Willa Cather in Context: Progress, Race, Empire (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996).

Twentieth-Century American Women’s Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1999).

Ed., F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Wordsworth edition available only in UK: 2001)

Ed., Willa Cather: Critical Assessments, 4 Volumes (Roberstsbridge, Sussex: Helm Information, 2003)

Ed., Cather Studies 7: Willa Cather as Cultural Icon (Lincoln: U of Nebraska Press, 2007)

Apostles of Modernity: American Writers in the Age of Development (Lincoln: U of Nebraska Press, 2008)

Ed., (with Melissa Homestead), Cather Studies 9: Willa Cather and Modern Cultures (Lincoln: U of Nebraska Press, 2011)

Ed., Willa Cather, My Ántonia (New York: Bedford,  2012)

Ed. Cather Studies 12: Willa Cather and the Arts (Lincoln: U of Nebraska Press, 2020)

Sensing Willa Cather: The Writer and the Body in Transition (Edinburgh: U of Edinburgh Press, 2021)

August 2022

Areas of Interest

Willa Cather

Modernism

American Literary History

Post-War Fiction

U.S. and Anglophone Literary Internationalism