My work spans two broad fields of inquiry. The first is gender and sexuality, psychoanalysis, and twentieth-century fiction (with a focus on Virginia Woolf). My first book, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (1989), uncovered the legacies of Freud and Melanie Klein in Woolf’s narrative strategies. My new book Odd Affinities: Virginia Woolf’s Shadow Genealogies (2024), explores the afterlives of Virginia Woolf in unexpected places and cultural traditions across the twentieth century: not the popular cultural appropriations, but the subtle resonances and subtextual conversations that are audible in writers as diverse as Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, and W.G. Sebald.
My second area of inquiry is race, cultural studies, and visuality. This inquiry culminated in my second book, Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (2010), which charts the cultural history of segregation signs through their mediation by photography.
My current research addresses the concept of resonance as a framework for mapping literary transmission. Sponsored by the France-Berkeley Fund, a series of colloquia in Paris and Berkeley (2019, 2022) brought French and American scholars from a range of disciplines together to elicit the resonances of Virginia Woolf’s writing across diverse cultures and mediums. In spring, 2024, a final colloquium will expand our frame to include a broad spectrum of writers and musicians. My co-organizers and I plan to collect the papers from this colloquium in a volume that we hope will spark an ongoing inquiry.
