Works
Work in Progress and in Process
My Book "Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work," is now out from Zone Books in paperback.
"Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History." Forthcoming from Zone Books, 2021.
Colonies Before Colonialism.
Montaigne and the Arts of Reading.
The Politics of Babel: The Languages of Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe.
A translation of Philippe Soupault's, "Terpsichore," the first sustained writing in French about Jazz (1928). In collaboration with Jessica Levine.
Recently out.
"Sancho's Fortune: Money and Narrative Truth in Don Quixote" MLN, Spring 2021.
"Baroque Diplomacy," in Oxford Handbook to the Baroque, edited by John Lyons, 2019.
"The Early Novel and the Transmission of Culture," with Linda Louie, in the Oxford Handbook to the Novel in French, edited by Adam Watt, 2019.
"Distinguished Visitors." in Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World, edited by Joanna Craigwood and Tracey Sowerby, Oxford University Press, 2020.
"Close Encounters: Literary Monstrosity and Corporeal Knowledge in Early Modern France." Spring 2017 issue of ALTER on monstrosity and disability studies.
"Michel de Montaigne: Philosophy Before Philosophy," A History of Modern French Literature, edited by Christopher Prendergast. Princeton University Press.
"In the Shadow of War: Tragedy, Diplomacy and the Poetics of the Truce." In "Soft Power and Theater in the Early Modern Period," edited by Nathalie Riviere de Carles.
"Virgil in India: Epic and Military Strategy in the Lusiads." MLN, spring 2016.
"Michel de Montaigne: Philosophy as Improvisation." Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisational Studies, edited by George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut.
"Colonies Without Colonialism: Territory, Population, and Literature from Foucault to Montaigne." In Humanism/Anti-Humanism, edited by Jan Miernowski.
"La foi des traités: Baroque History, International Law, and the Politics of Reading in Corneille's 'Rodogune.'" Yale French Studies, 124, "Walter Benjamin's Imaginary French Trauerspiel," edited by Katherine Ibbett and Hall Bjornstad. A study of the peace treaty as a problematic text in early modern political culture.
Virgil in India
Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France
Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe
Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work
Study of Dylan's achievements as an artist of song, focusing on the intersection of lyrics and music.
Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature
Winner of the Bainton Book Prize for the best recent work in Renaissance Studies