Hillsdale College

Faculty Member, English

About

Though I am a generalist by training and inclination, I have specialized in Victorian Literature and Philosophy, and am especially interested in questions of knowledge and personhood in nineteenth-century fiction and nonfiction. My dissertation (defended 7/2011) addressed these topics in the thought of George Eliot and John Henry Newman.

In particular, I argued that both Eliot and Newman were dissatisfied with, or rather unconvinced of, the anthropology put forth by modern liberalism (acc. to which human nature is radically free of history, tradition, community, and authority), and the resulting epistemological options. Each, then, strove to craft a postliberal anthropology and epistemology, but only Newman, on my view, succeeded. He did so by re-introducing an Aristotelian, virtue-ethical (and virtue-rhetorical) view of the human person, thus paving the way for 20th c. neo-Aristotelians such as MacIntyre et al.

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