Bio

Here’s a general introduction: I’m a professor and occasionally a journalist (a journalist in a loose sense, a writer of commentary in newspapers and magazines). I spend part of the year in Maine, USA, when I’m teaching, and part in London and Cambridge, UK, where much of my research is based. I lived in England for several years while completing my doctorate at Oxford. I like it there and I like it here, so I try to go back and forth.

I was an NCAA Division I All-Conference middle-distance runner an increasingly long time ago. Today I run to stay fit and keep my head clear and I play football (soccer). I also spend a lot of time watching and reading and talking about football (soccer), especially my beloved Tottenham Hotspur in the English Premier League. They say you don’t choose the club, the club chooses you: I was born on the day Spurs were founded, 100 years later.

Going on unnecessarily long walks, observing the groundhogs, reading in pubs (UK), sitting at the bar (US) instead of at the table, perusing consignment stores for clothing deals, swimming too far out into the ocean, being on or around trains, and systematizing / putting things in order are all activities I enjoy. My writing on various subjects has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Washington Post, and other venues.

In case you’re interested in my academic research and teaching, I say more about that below:

I'm an Associate Professor of English at Colby College and Chair of the Science, Technology, and Society (STS) Department. I teach courses on the history of British literature and the Enlightenment and on literature as / and philosophy, especially philosophy of fiction. I’m increasingly interested in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and am in the process of teaching myself some new skills to do more of that. I’m also applying some of my work in philosophy of fiction to the question of how to characterize and understand the outputs of large language models (LLMs), which, like many types of fiction, contain a lot of facts mixed with a lot of invention.

My primary goal as a researcher is to produce explanatory knowledge, which I think is hindered by remaining within a narrow disciplinary mindset. My research takes the history of British literature from roughly 1600-1815 as a basis for understanding how we frame and organize knowledge and how fact, fiction, and inference work together in the various types of writing we have called “literature”: not only fiction and poetry, but also scientific atlases, political pamphlets, correspondences, and travelogues. I treat the texts I study mainly as discursive documents of ideas that tell us useful things about history, philosophy, science, and political theory.

My first book, A World of Disorderly Notions: Quixote and the Logic of Exceptionalism (University of Virginia Press, 2019), explains the concept of exceptionalism, a belief that one's special mission or outlook on the world justifies not having to follow the same rules as everyone else. The character of Don Quixote, rewritten for differing eras and international audiences since 1605, helps us understand how exceptionalist thinking and behavior can lead to the conflation of fact and fiction, motive and outcome. My most recent (short) book, Empirical Knowledge in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2022), explains how fiction made important contributions to Enlightenment empiricism through demonstrations of inferential reasoning. I’ve also co-edited a book on the history of British Literature and Technology, 1600-1830. I’m currently writing a book on Understanding Science Denial. You can find my CV here.