I am professor of English at Pace University in downtown Manhattan, and author of The Portrait’s Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Studies in U.S. Cultures Series, University of North Carolina Press, 2019) as well as the Introductions for the Penguin Classics centennial edition of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence and The Custom of the Country. I’m editor of The Norton Library’s new edition of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (2025).
My essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, The New Republic and elsewhere as well as in American Literature, the Henry James Review, and MELUS: Multiethnic Literature of the United States. I am currently working on a book about mid-century children’s book publishing and am represented by Sarah Smith at David Black Agency.
John Singer Sargent. Mrs. Hugh Hammersley (detail), 1892. Oil on canvas; 81 x 45 1/2 in. (205.7 x 115.6 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,