About Me
I am an English professor and a writer specializing in American cultural history, with a focus on issues of health, race, and disability. In my work, I try to capture experiences that have been pushed to the margins of history: sleep, madness, freakishness. I am drawn to stories of people who apparently played a minor role in history (mad prophets, sleepwalking servants, itinerant performers, human curiosities) but whose experiences can tell us something about how the world got to be the strange way that it is.
After receiving my PhD from UC Berkeley, I got my start as a professor in the English department at Tulane University, where I taught from 1998-2005; since then, I have been a professor of English at Emory University, where I served as department chair from 2017-2023. Lately, I have devoted a good deal of energy to public humanities, an emerging framework for humanistic scholarship that promotes collaborative research projects between academics and community arts & civic institutions. You can read about some of my efforts here. As a teacher, I’ve worked closely with talented graduate students, many of whom are publishing their own work and teaching at colleges and universities like University of Michigan, Clemson University, Case Western Reserve, Haverford College, Union College, and Rikkyo University in Japan. I especially like helping emerging scholars find their passion as writers and teachers, something I’ve enjoyed doing in my editorial work as well
Interior of Henry David Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond, where he wrote, "I have never met man who was quite awake."
My first book, The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s America, was published by Harvard University Press in 2001. It told the story of one of the first media spectacles in American history: P.T. Barnum’s exhibit of Joice Heth, an elderly, disabled enslaved woman who claimed to be the oldest living human and the former nurse of baby George Washington. Barnum took her on tour across the Northeast, and the minutest features of her exhibit were covered exhaustively in the new commercial press, in an 1830s version of reality TV. When she died, Barnum arranged to have an autopsy performed in public. He charged admission (of course), and the press debated the findings for months in a gruesome feeding frenzy. I saw in this story one of the starting points of our media obsession with race and violence.
A confining bed that patients in a 19th-century asylum were caged in when they were unruly.
During a research leave in 2001-2002 supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fellowship, I worked in an amazing library in Worcester, Massachusetts, the American Antiquarian Society, on a new project on the cultural history of American insane asylums. One of my main sources was a patient-run literary journal from the 1850s, the Opal, which offered a powerful vision of life in nineteenth-century America from the perspective of the first cohort of patients in a public mental hospital. I also found records of the patients’ blackface minstrel troupe, which put on some of the strangest performances I can imagine. The book that resulted, Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture, was published in 2008 by the University of Chicago Press.
Next, I undertook a couple of editorial projects (The Cambridge History of the American Novel and Keywords for Disability Studies) and mapped out a new project on the cultural history of sleep. Supported by a Guggenheim fellowship, I wrote Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World, which was published in 2017 by Basic Books. This book is part of an emerging field sometimes called “critical sleep studies,” which explores how cultures and societies make meaning out of sleep, sleeplessness, and related phenomena. I was fascinated to think about how this fundamental aspect of human experience — which is generally left out of the historical record — can be shaped and molded by grand historical forces like technology, war, and social conflict. Since then, I’ve been excited to enter into conversations with sleep researchers from the sciences and a number of health-related fields. I’ve even joined the board of a terrific journal, Sleep Health. I’m working now as an editor of a multi-volume cultural history of sleep and dreaming for Bloomsbury press. And I’m writing a collection of essays on the pre-history of neurodiversity in nineteenth-century America.