Advising and Teaching
Advising
I regularly advise dissertations and theses in all areas of nineteenth-century British literature and culture, but with particular attention to poetry, non-fiction, and religion/theology. I also encourage topics focusing on ecology, religion/theology, and poetry.
Doctoral Dissertations Directed
Stewart Riley (defended 2024), “Joining Voices: A Study of Public Worship in Victorian Poetics”
Allison Scheidegger Reising (defended 2024), “Playful Scholarship: The Brownings’ Creative Interaction with Homer and Euripides”
Ryan Sinni (defended 2023) “‘A road from earth to sky’: Christina Rossetti’s Theological Arrangements”
Molly Lewis (defended 2022) “Poets in the Pulpit: Clerical Critics on Tennyson and the Brownings”
Holly Spofford (defended 2021) “Apocalyptic Care: The Renewal of Creation in Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Gerard Manley Hopkins”
Elizabeth Travers Parker (defended 2021) “Holy Spirit, Holy Dove: An Ecotheology of Birds in Victorian Poetics”
Caitlin Lawrence (defended 2020) “Reimagining the Contes de Fées: Female Fairy Tales in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England and Their Exploration of the World In-Between”
Lindsay Fenton (defended 2019) “Paradigms of Knowledge and Narratives of Human Flourishing in Victorian Realism”
Alicia McCartney (defended 2019) “Prayers from the Wreck: Shipwreck Narratives and Imagined Spiritual Communities in Nineteenth-Century Britain”
David Smith (defended 2017) “Blake’s Aesthetic Messianism: Multimodal Art as the Rhetoric of Transformation”
Michael Milburn (defended 2016) “Preface to ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’: Coleridge on the Uses of the Supernatural in Narrative”
Melinda Creech (defended 2016) “Hopkins’s Homer: A Scholarly Edition of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Dublin Notes on the Iliad”
DeAnn Barta Stuart (defended 2016) “The Symbol’s End: Reflections on the Coleridgean Symbol’s Eschatological Telos”
Masters Theses Directed
Savannah Chorn (2023), “The Marriage of Heaven and earth in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s A Drama of Exile, Sonnets from The Portuguese, and ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point'”
Stewart Riley (2019) “Persons, Perceptions, and Play: Human Christological Inscape in the Work of Gerard Manley Hopkins”
Elizabeth Travers Parker (2015) “‘The darling child of speech’: Hopkins’s Pedagogy of Poetic Performance”
Naomi Tober (2010) “Between Two Worlds and Between the Lines: A Reading of the Supernatural in James Hogg’s Fiction”
Undergraduate Theses and Research Projects Directed
Eliza Denley (2024-ongoing, Honors Thesis), “Wendell Berry’s Sabbath Environmentalism”
Justin Demsky (2023, 2024), McNair Scholars Program Summer Research Projects: “Understanding the use of dialect in Victorian Scottish Working-Class Poetry” (2023), “Fear in the EcoGothic: How the Merging of Human and Nonhuman Spaces Becomes a Source of Fear in Gothic Literature” (2024)
Caitlin Washburn (2012, Honors Thesis), “The Image of Christ in Thomas Hardy’s Poetry of Progress”
Courses Taught
ENG 2301: British Literature
ENG 3360: Literature and the Environment
ENG 3370: Religion and Literature (Poetry and Religion in 19th C. Britain)
ENG 3372: Oxford Christians
ENG 3378: Literature and Environmental Justice
ENG 4354: Romantic Poetry
ENG 4362: Victorian Poetry
ENG 4364: The Brownings
ENGL 4365: Literature and Environmental Justice (significantly updated to satisfy Engaged Learning requirement)
ENG 5304: Bibliography and Research Methods
ENG 5350: Early English Romantic Literature (Romanticism and Religion)
ENG 5352: Later English Romantic Literature (Alternative Redemptions)
ENG 5374: Topics in Literature (Reforming Christ’s Body in Victorian Poetry)
ENG 5361: Victorian Poetry
For International Nineteenth-Century Studies Summer Program (a program that I founded and ran from 2017-2018 to offer multi-site courses for grad students that included extended study trips to the United Kingdom, particularly the Lake District)
ENG 5374: Wordsworth, Poetry, and the Environment (Summer 2017)
ENG 5374: Dwelling Responsibly: Legacy of the English Lakes (Summer 2018)
Student Exhibitions Directed
“The Brownings in Our World”Nov. 2020-2021, Digital Exhibition on Website and staged—in part—at Armstrong Browning Library, Brownings class of Fall 2020 https://blogs.baylor.edu/thebrowningsinourworld/
“‘Orphans of Earthly Love’: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Protest for Working Children” 1 October 2018 through 1 April 2019, Hankamer Treasure Room, Armstrong Browning Library and online. Victorian Poetry class of Spring 2018 https://sites.baylor.edu/rhymeandreform/
“Romanticism at the ABL: Perceptions and Relationships”22 January 2018 through 1 June 2018, Hankamer Treasure Room, Armstrong Browning LibraryRomantic Poetry class of Fall 2017
“Choosing the Right Words: Revision & Reception in the Victorian Period” 28 April 2017 through 6 November 2017, Hankamer Treasure Room, Armstrong Browning Library, Victorian Poetry class of Spring 2017