Teaching: I have not been able to give a useful ranking to my teaching interests. In recent years I've had the chance to teach critical theory, Milton, eighteenth-century literature from Dryden to Burke, Romantic poetry, literature of the so-called "White South" (from Faulkner to Dorothy Allison), and medieval literature (Langland, the Gawain-poet, Wyclif, and Chaucer); beyond that, several years of teaching the survey course have made me a somewhat useful amateur on Spenser, seventeenth century poetry, Joyce, Larkin, Heaney, and Angela Carter.

Research: I'm writing about a "conservatism" in literary theory from Edmund Burke through Coleridge to the Southern New Critics.