FIELDS:
Modern European Intellectual History
Early Modern European Intellectual History
Women's Studies
History of Rhetoric
BIOGRAPHY:
I have been teaching in the (now) University Honors College since 1997. I teach the freshman sequence The Global City, the second-year methods course Urban Humanities, and many upper-level seminars. I also teach the upper-level special writing course for transfer students.
My scholarly interests have developed out of my training as an intellectual historian and my research into modern European intellectual culture. These interests are specifically focused upon and through the interpretation of the work of the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. I have been particularly interested in examining the question of Nietzsche’s appropriation of the seventeenth-century baroque moralists La Rochefoucauld, Pascal, and Gracián for his critique of the morality and culture of late nineteenth-century Germany.
My interest in Nietzsche’s rewriting of the past and the creation of new myths of modernity has been translated into a teaching interest in studying the imaginary and ideological nature of our modern urban experience. I have worked to make the methodological and theoretical approach that I take with respect to the body of texts that I investigate in my research the basis for my approach to teaching about globalization and urbanization. As a working scholar in a field of the humanities, I want to model for our students how one locates key texts within an historical context, how one recognizes the formal rhetorical structure that shapes the meaning of a text, and how to relate the form of a text to its overt content in such a way that the social codes and discourses crucial to its interpretation can be identified and examined. This is overdetermined by the fact that many of the texts I investigate are themselves crucial moments in the establishment of the very critical approaches and methodologies within the sciences and the humanities that it is the mission of the Honors program to teach. Canonical texts can be read in non-canonical ways that make the critical potential of that past available to students.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:
Most recent publication: “How One Becomes What One Is;” Intertextuality and Autobiography in Ecce Homo” in Nietzsche’s “Ecce Homo”, eds. Duncan Large and Nicholas Martin, de Gruyter (2021): 49-68.