As an English professor, I teach nineteenth-century American literature and college writing. My research as a literary scholar takes up a number of topics such as Transcendentalism, Romanticism, Puritanism, nature writing, labor studies, book history, and poetics, while my work as a compositionist engages questions of how college students learn to write.

I hold a PhD in English from UCLA and have taught at six institutions, including UCLA, Loyola Marymount University, and Chapman University. Currently, I teach at California State University, Los Angeles, and with Kathleen Crosby (Elon) I co-edit Emerson Society Papers.

The Divinity of Labor: American Transcendentalism and the Meaning of Work

My first book project argues that Transcendentalism organized itself around contemporary debates over “free labor” that attended New England’s industrial revolution, and that it sought a revolution of the spirit in an increasingly secular society. Reading Emerson alongside Fuller, the Ripleys, the Alcotts, Thoreau, Carlyle, Brownson, Douglass, Nell, Sidney, and Grimké, I trace a multiracial discourse of labor and moral economy that challenged a freedom predicated on property.

Unprompted: Natural Intelligence and the Future of College Writing

My second book project comes out of fifteen years of teaching writing to undergraduates. It argues for a dialogic approach to process pedagogy: that when we teach students to write by talking and read by listening, they develop their own voices as well as confidence in their own intellectual abilities.