My graduate studies were in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, with a primary emphasis in German, classical Greek, and Latin literatures. I began my teaching career at Harvard, where I offered courses in both German and Comparative Literature and served as the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities. Here at Carolina, I hold a joint appointment in German and English & Comparative Literature, as well as an adjunct position in the Department of Classical Studies. My courses in Comparative Literature include classes in literary theory, the history of poetics, eighteenth and nineteenth-century fiction, aestheticism, and several on ancient-modern relations. My teaching in German has concentrated on narrative fiction from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century but includes courses on Nietzsche, Freud, and Walter Benjamin. In 2004, I was presented with the Johnson Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, and in 2015 with the Distinguished Teaching Award for Post-Baccalaureate Instruction and Mentoring. I have also served for various stretches of time as both Director of Comparative Literature and as co-Director of the Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German Studies.
My research has spanned the fields of classical literary theory, Greek drama, Roman elegy, and ancient/ modern relations, as well as German nineteenth-century realism and twentieth-century modernism. My most recent interest has been in the afterlife of ancient practices of divinatory reading in the literature and thought of the German nineteenth and twentieth centuries.