I’m a scholar of comparative literature, with an extensive background in foreign languages, ancient and modern (German, Latin, Russian, Classical Greek, and (recently) French), as well as a training in literary theory and continental philosophy. My scholarly interests lie principally in the modernist imagination, and my thought is animated by an inquiry into the various boundaries between literature and philosophy, divinity and atheism, and nihilism and transcendence. My dissertation dealt with intoxication in works of modernist authors including Joyce, Mann, Benjamin, and Nietzsche. I examined the various ways states of intoxication have been correlated with, likened to, or differentiated from visionary or dream states, in aesthetic theory and practice.
