Andrew teaches courses about and conducts research on US literature.
Research Interests
Andrew’s research uses literature to examine the cultural history of leisure in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US. Drawing upon sociology, the environmental humanities, and critical theory, his scholarship explores what leisure has meant, what it could mean under different economic conditions or within different social configurations, and the relationship between leisure and other concepts like nature and culture. He is currently working on a book manuscript that examines the crystallization of leisure in its modern form—commercially exploitable periods of free time—and the efforts of industrial-era, middle-class, US authors to conceptualize and regulate the proper uses of free time.
Biography
Andrew’s research focuses on the cultural history of leisure in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth- century US, as that history was shaped by processes like industrialization, urbanization, and commercialization. This research informs his teaching, which often invites students to explore, by way of health writing, travel narratives, and more conventional types of literature, the historical meanings and future possibilities of leisure as well as of related concepts, such as health, work, and nature. As for his own leisure practices, you can often find Andrew cycling around the outskirts of Oxford.
“Deep-Time Tourism: ‘The Encantadas’ and Crystal Palace Park.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, vol. 80, no. 1, 2024, pp. 83-115;
"Darl's Bucket, Cash's Casket, and a Rogue River-Log: The Nature of Wood in As I Lay Dying." Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 69, no. 2, 2023, pp. 232-254;
“Making Sympathy ‘Vicious’ on The Island of Doctor Moreau.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts, vol. 43, no. 2, 2021. DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2021.1898229;
“Health or Wealth? Environmentalism and Consumerism in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.” The Midwest Quarterly, vol. 60, no. 4, 2019, pp. 402–418;
"Wasted Bulls and Fungus-Ridden Fish: Waste, Travel, and Entitlement in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises." The Hemingway Review, vol. 38, no. 2, 2019, pp. 27–41
Courses Taught
- English 220 Survey in Literary History: Literature and Leisure
- English 223 Survey in American Literatures to the Civil War
- English 340 Transcendentalism and Reform
- English 2501 Narrative in Health and Medicine
- English 3440 Nineteenth-Century American Travel Writing
- English 3444 Transcendentalism and Reform
- English 4554 Pastoral Obsession in Modernist American Fiction
Education
Ph.D. English, Ohio State University (2023)
M.A. English, The University of Tennessee (2012)
B.A. English, University of Richmond (2008)