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
“Seeds of Change: Waco’s Sustainable Tomorrow”
https://blogs.baylor.edu/lej/
This exhibition was created by students in a literature and environmental justice class at Baylor University (Waco, Texas) in Fall 2024 with members of SCRAP, a local collective growing an equitable food ecosystem. The exhibition includes students’ creative reflections on their experiences and stories, insights, and voices they collected from SCRAP Collective members.
“The Brownings in Our World”
https://blogs.baylor.edu/thebrowningsinourworld/
Nov. 2020-2021, Digital Exhibition on Website and staged—in part—at Armstrong Browning Library, Brownings class of Fall 2020
“‘Orphans of Earthly Love’: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Protest for Working Children”
https://sites.baylor.edu/rhymeandreform/
1 October 2018 through 1 April 2019, Hankamer Treasure Room, Armstrong Browning Library and online. Victorian Poetry class of Spring 2018
“Romanticism at the ABL: Perceptions and Relationships”
22 January 2018 through 1 June 2018, Hankamer Treasure Room, Armstrong Browning Library, Romantic Poetry class of Fall 2017
“Choosing the Write 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