Cognitive Boundaries: Perception, Style, and Ethics in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Barker Center
12 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Elaine Scarry, Leah Price, and Philip Fisher
Why doesn’t stream of consciousness appear in nineteenth-century texts? The term was coined in 1859, and theories of the mind that defined consciousness as a chaotic mass of perceptual information had existed since the 1780s. Why, then, did the literary style associated with unrestrained cognition fail to take hold? My dissertation investigates this absence in Victorian literature by interrogating the connection between cognition and literary form. Using theories of cognitive restraint from several disciplines, I argue that controlling thought processes was seen as integral to the construction of ethical personhood and solved philosophical problems related to deliberation and action.
Harvard University, Cambridge MA
Instructor, Department of English
Spring 2012, Austen and Woolf
Fall 2010, Living in a Victorian World
Teaching Fellow
Spring 2012, Crime and Horror in Victorian Literature and Culture (Professor Matthew Kaiser)
Spring 2011, The Nineteenth-Century Novel (Professor Elaine Scarry)
Fall 2010, The Classic Phase of the Novel (Professor Philip Fisher)
Spring 2010, Political Theater and the Structure of Drama (Professor Elaine Scarry)
Fall 2009, The Classic Phase of the Novel (Professor Philip Fisher)
Head Teaching Fellow
Spring 2012, Crime and Horror in Victorian Literature and Culture (Professor Matthew Kaiser)
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA
Program Administrator
Summers of 2009-2012, Culture of London Study Abroad Program (Professors Michael Levenson, Claire Kinney, and Cynthia Wall)
“The Ethics of Flatness: Character in Dickens’s Bleak House.” Northeast Modern Language Association. Boston. March 2013.
“Unweaving the Rainbow: Gender and Structure in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.” American Comparative Literature Association. Providence. March 2012.
“The Speaking Dead: Animated Corpses and National Crisis in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson and Alfred Tennyson.” Modern Language Association. Seattle. January 2012.
“Distortions of Perception: Consciousness and First-Person Narration in Charles Dickens and Henry James.” North American Victorian Studies Association. Montréal. November 2010.
“Alice Meynell, the New Woman, and the Aesthetics of Disobedience.” Women Writers of the Fin de Siècle. London. June 2010.
“Superstition and the Supernatural in Thomas Hardy.” Northeast Modern Language Association. Boston. February 2009.
“Henry James and the Psychology of Scale: Consciousness and First-Person Narration in The Sacred Fount.” Modern Language Association. San Francisco. December 2008.
“Revolutionary Aesthetics: Perception in Alice Meynell’s ‘The Woman in Grey’ and Walter Pater’s ‘Diaphaneitè.’”Midwest Modern Language Association. Chicago. November 2006.
“Divisions and Reconciliations: Gendered Visions of Stasis and Mobility in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.” The Space Between: 1914-1955. Lewisburg (Bucknell University). June 2006.
Dexter Summer Fellowship (2012)
Merit Term-Time Research Fellowship (2011)
Jens Aubrey Westengard Traveling Fellowship (2009)
Cooper Siegel Fellow (2007-8)
Harvard University Certificate of Distinction in Teaching (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012)
Wagenheim Memorial Scholar (2005)
Co-Chair, British Literature Colloquium, Harvard English Department (2008-2010)
Co-Director, Child Library, Harvard English Department (2009-2011)