A.B., University of Detroit
M.A., Northwestern University
B.D., University of London
Ph.D., Yale University

Specializes in seventeenth-century literature, Milton, Donne, and comparative literature. He is currently working on the early history of English Studies, especially on the place of Shakespeare in the curriculum of American colleges. 

 EN080.03 - Literary Forms

 EN131.04 - Studies in Poetry

 EN340.01 - Milton

 EN721.01 - Milton|

• John Donne in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford University Press, 2007.
• "Donne's Afterlife," in The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, 2006.
• "George Eliot as 'Miltonist': Marriage and Milton in Middlemarch," in Milton and Gender, Cambridge University Press, 2004.
• "When Performance Is at Odds with Narrative: The Designated Mourner as Wallace Shawn's Wager on John Donne," Narrative, 8.2 (2000).
• Milton's Burden of Interpretation, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.
  

ADDITIONAL PROFESSIONAL INFORMATION
Writing Awards:
The James Holly Hanford Prize (for "Milton's Burden of Interpretation")
The John Donne Society Award for Distinguished Publication, 1989; 2002
The Boydston Essay Prize, 2003

Teaching Award:
Boston College Distinguished Teaching Award, 2000

Professional Honors and Offices:
Guggenheim Fellow
President of the John Milton Society, 1996-97
President of the John Donne Society, 1994-95
Modern Language Association Division on Literature and Religion (chair, 2002-04)
Advisory Board, The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne; the John Donne Journal; the International John Bunyan Society