Faculty Research Interests

My primary research focuses on moral language and its practical significance. What do we use it to do? Why would we have a discursive practice with this function? And how does its function shed light on the norms that structure the practice? This was the topic of my dissertation, which I'm now working to turn into my first book.

I also work on our practices of holding one another accountable to shared moral norms. I'm interested in what kind of standing one has to have in order to successfully hold someone to the oughts that bind them and the social practices that either support or undermine this standing. My present project aims to understand how the fragmentation of thick community relations instigated by the rise of social media, the decline in civic organizations and organized religion, and changing economic realities has made it more difficult for us to hold one another accountable. 

I'm also interested in jokes, and, in particular, how jokes can be used to ease communication about difficult subjects.

• Pharmacology
• Neuropsychology
• Cannabis Medicine
• Pharmacy Technician CE

My book manuscript, Publishing Personality: Romantic Periodicals and the Paradox of Living Authorship, examines how the media environment of the British Romantic periodical plays host to an extended attempt to theorize, narrativize, and stabilize the meaning of the contemporary, crystallizing it through the figure of the living author. Caught between the copyright accorded to books, and their own position as paid piece-workers, periodical writers identify the ‘living author’ as a problematic state—stressing the conditional, serial features of authorship in practice, and probing the uncertainty of contemporary judgments about literary value, authorial life, and even truth. My chapters survey crises and scandals in the periodical sphere; from the famous personal attacks on Keats and Leigh Hunt, to the misogynistic reviewing of female novelists like Fanny Burney and Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), to the uproar over the political apostasies of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. I argue that periodicals understand the living author as incarnating the problems of making sense of a rapidly-changing contemporary world. Paradoxically, the periodical’s vexed engagement with the living author as a threat ends up elaborating the concept, constructing publication as a guarantor of self and identity and the periodical as the space where the author can construct a sense of truth and authenticity, even at times in defiance of the material realities that surround them.

I am also at work on a digital humanities project, which involves the production of a TEI-compliant edition of the Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine series “Noctes Ambrosianae”. This collaboratively-authored magazine series has proved a source of enduring delight and scandal (for its contemporaries) and of scholarly fascination (for Romanticists today). The edition does not merely reproduce the portion of the series produced under the leadership of John Gibson Lockhart, but also tags important semantic and textual features including the use of languages and dialects, the representation of historical figures, and the inscription or performance of different attributes of class, gender, and nationality. With the end goal enhanced searchability and extractability, the edition aims to promote engagement with the series from scholars across Romantic literary and historical studies. Undergraduate students in Widener University’s Textual Scholarship Certificate Program contribute to the production of the edition. 

My primary research interests lie in commutative algebra and its interactions with algebraic geometry. I have worked on plucker formulas, generalized Hilbert functions, and multipolicies as well as Chunovsky's conjecture. My secondary research interest focuses on the active control of beam and string systems.

Green chemistry, also known as sustainable chemistry, is the design, development and implementation of chemical products and processes to reduce or eliminate the use and generation of substances hazardous to human health and the environment. Under the principles of green chemistry, my research focuses on the design, synthesis, characterization and modification of solid-state inorganic or inorganic-organic hybrid materials for sustainable energy application, particularly in the area of gas storage, rechargeable batteries and thermal energy storage.

I'm interested in Web technologies, large scale computing, data mining, and bioinformatics.