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 Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, forthcoming in 2025 by The Norton Library.
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 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,