I am Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA, and the author of Romantic Imperialism (Cambridge University Press, 1998), William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (University of Chicago Press, 2003), and Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (WW Norton, 2008; revised and updated, with a new foreword by Alice Walker, 2010).
I am currently completing work on a book tentatively called Civilizing Empire: Race, Culture, and the Civilization of Britain, 1798-1870, which is about the afterlives of the British radical culture of the 1790s. The book moves from discussions of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron and Blake to explorations of the work of Jane Austen, Robert Southey, Francis Place, William Godwin, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, Thomas Macaulay, John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens and others. Among other things, it aims to re-evaluate the significance of Romanticism as one of the key sites of resistance to the imperial culture that would consolidate itself in Britain after 1815, and would go on to affect virtually every aspect of British culture by the end of the nineteenth century.
I am also the co-editor of the volume The Arabian Nights in Historical Context (Oxford University Press, 2008), and of Marxism Beyond Marxism (Routledge, 1996).
I am also Editor of the journal Nineteenth-Century Literature, which is published by the University of California Press.
I received my PhD from the Literature Program at Duke University in 1993, and my BA from Wesleyan University in 1987.
Most of my scholarship focuses on the culture of modernity and empire in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain (the Romantic period), but I am also interested in the consequences and afterlives of modernity and empire in the contemporary Arab world, especially Lebanon and Palestine, about which I have published extensively in scholarly books as well as in academic journals such as Critical Inquiry.
In the spirit of speaking not only to a relatively narrow circle of scholars sharing a common expertise but to a broader public as well, I have written a number of articles on contemporary events which have appeared in, among others, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Nation, The Huffington Post, The London Review of Books and the Beirut newspaper al-akhbar. I have also spoken or appeared on, among others, the BBC World Service, National Public Radio, al-Jazeera, PBS, South African Broadcasting Corporation’s SAFM, and Radio National in Australia.
