My professional life divides into three stages. Before 2007, my scholarship focused on Arnold Bennett; my book, Modernism, Modernity, and Arnold Bennett, was called a “landmark study [that] has set an entirely new agenda for the study of Bennett's work.” I contributed essays on different facets of Bennett’s work to Simpson and Kaplan’s Seeing Double and DeMoor’s Marketing the Author, gave the keynote at the Arnold Bennett Society conference, and organized a panel on the 100th anniversary of Bennett’s The Old Wive’s Tale for the MLA conference.
The second stage began with my appointment as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. In that role, I have helped the program convert its core from a traditional Eurocentric model to one that pursues a de-centered, global perspective. At the same time, I have overseen the creation of curriculum for the Global Liberal Studies bachelor’s degree.
I have also contributed extensively in the field of educational technology, presenting at numerous educational technology conferences in the US and Europe, including a keynote (with Lucy Appert) at Apereo 2015. I have been particularly active in re-defining e-portfolios and in pushing for the disaggregation of the bundled set of (often inadequate) tools called the Learning Management System.
In the third stage of my career, I have begun more intensively to explore the influence of Global Studies theory on the humanities, an interest that has borne fruit in an NYU GIAS grant and in my senior seminar, “World Heritage: UNESCO and the Politics of Culture.”