I received my PhD from the University of California, Irvine in 2002, and was visiting assistant professor and postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia until 2007, when I joined the English department at UVic. I was promoted to full professor in 2018.
I teach Shakespeare and other Renaissance authors as well as courses in literary theory and criticism. I’m interested in the question of why humans need such things as literature, art, and religion, and have found the anthropological theories of Émile Durkheim, René Girard, Eric Gans, Terrence Deacon, and Ernest Gellner illuminating. What connects these thinkers is the idea that humans are mimetic-symbolic animals.
My sympathy for this idea is evident in my approach to Shakespeare, an approach I have attempted to systematize in three books: Shakespeare’s Big Men (University of Toronto Press, 2016), Shakespeare’s Mad Men (Stanford University Press, 2023), and Shakespeare’s Exiles (Routledge 2025).