My Background
Originally from the mountains of Colorado, I have lived and worked across the world as I pursued my interests in Italian and European literature, culture, and history, first as a student then as a professor.
I completed my BA studying philosophy and Italian at the University of Notre Dame and then went to The University of Chicago where I received my MA and PhD from the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. During my time as a student I also studied at the University of Bologna, in Italy.
After graduating with my PhD, I moved to Ankara, Turkey, where I taught in the Program in Cultures, Civilizations, and Ideas at Bilkent University. My next stop was at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, where I held the Powys Roberts Research Fellowship in European Literature and taught on modern Italian authors. Finally, I moved to the University of California, Davis, where I currently teach in the Department of Comparative Literature and in the Department of French and Italian, focusing on modern Italian and European literature in a global perspective and leading courses on topics including fantasy, critical theory, futurism, the avant-gardes, as well as a range of courses on Italian literature, culture, and history. See here for more on my current and recent teaching.
My Work
I am drawn to studying and writing about how creators work through fundamental philosophical questions in their literature and art. This interest has led me in multiple directions. Often, I examine works and ideas from Italian, German, French, and English sources - but not always. Likewise, I frequently focus on the rich moment of global cultural upheaval and renewal at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century, the storied fin de siècle, with a particular eye to the power of fantasy or imagination as ways of responding to and reconfiguring a world in crisis.
My scholarship takes up debates about the nature of decadence and modernism in that moment, arguing that we cannot understand the period without thinking comparatively across cultures, genres, and media. As a result, my work ranges from philosophical concepts (idealism, positivism, existentialism, relativism/perspectivism, Lebensphilosophie, Sprachkritik) to cultural phenomena (occultism, spiritualism, secularism) to movements (Symbolism, Futurism, Surrealism, the teatro grottesco) to modes of creation (theatre, early cinema, literature, poetry, visual art) and to major figures bridging all these (Luigi Pirandello, Gabriele d’Annunzio, FT Marinetti, Italo Svevo, Grazia Deledda, Eugenio Montale, Giacomo Leopardi… but also Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Nietzsche, Bergson… and many others). I do not have a single theoretical approach, although I am often interested in questions relating to political and social theory, gender and sexuality, and the relationship of human consciousness to the artificial world.
To find out more about these scholarly publications, take a look here, where I have organized my work around different themes or topics that I analyze and unpack in my writing - a network of interrelated clusters of ideas.
In addition to this scholarship, I also devote a significant amount of time to translation. I translate works from Italian into English, and I also edit the work of other translators as part of an open access digital humanities project I co-direct.