I am the author of three books on British literature and culture. The first, Desire and Contradiction, was published in the Cultural Politics series with Manchester University Press in 1990. The second, British Imperial Literature 1870-1940: Writing and the Administration of Empire, was published by Cambridge University Press in 1998. My new book, The Imagination of Class: Masculinity and the Victorian Urban Poor, a study of Victorian representations of urban poverty, was published in the spring of 2006. It was co-authored with Roger B. Henkle. I have published on 19th and 20th century fiction, travel writing, colonial discourse, and the literature of urban investigation.

At ASU, where I have been located since 1996, I have taught British fiction and poetry as well as the literary surveys and a graduate course in research methods and critical methodology. Recently, I have taught courses in Victorian Masculinities, Aestheticism and the Decadence, Victorian Sexuality, Imagining Class in the Victorian Age, and Victorians and the Problem of Character. In the Fall of 2002, I taught a course called "Victorian Sensations" which included a one-credit technology lab. For a more complete list of my teaching interests, see my cv.

I served as Chair of the English Department from 2000 to 2002 and became Associate Dean for Academic Programs in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in 2002 and Divisional Dean of Student and Academic Programs in 2004. In July 2007 I returned to fulltime work on the English faculty.