Background

Joe specializes in nineteenth-century British literature and its relationship to religion and secularization. His book, Liturgy, Ritual and Secularization in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, will soon be published by Cambridge University Press. The book argues that Romantic and Victorian writers use liturgy and religious ritual to reimagine and to overcome divisions that pervade modernity: body/soul, natural/supernatural, reason/faith, and so forth. More broadly, Joe’s interests include British literature, Transatlantic Romanticism, critical theory, film studies, and philosophical theology

Recent Publications

Liturgy, Ritual and Secularization in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2024)

“Rituals and Sacraments.” The Cambridge Companion to Religion in Victorian Literary Culture. Cambridge University Press. Ed. Mark Knight. (forthcoming 2024)

Review of The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism and Religion. The Wordsworth Circle. (forthcoming 2023)

“Teaching 19th-Century Literature Beyond the Secularisation Thesis: Introduction to the Special Forum.” Literature and Theology 36.4 (2022) 353-358

Guest Editor, special forum on “Teaching 19th-Cenutry Literature Beyond the Secularisation Thesis.” Literature and Theology 36.4 (2022)

“Oscar Wilde’s Catholic Aesthetics in a Secular Age,” SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 57.4 (2017) 865-886

“Remembering the Revolution: Wordsworth, Benjamin, and Mnemonic Critique,” European Romantic Review 28.2 (2017) 241-258

“‘Old faith is often modern heresy’: Re-enchanted Orthodoxy in Coleridge’s ‘The Eolian Harp’ and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Christianity and Literature 64.1 (2014) 21-42

Recent Presentations

“Just Secularization: Mary Augusta Ward’s Robert Elsmere and the Liturgy of Social Justice,” North American Victorian Studies Association, Bethlehem, PA, October 2022 

“Unsettling Doubt, Enfleshing Faith: Liturgical Form and Victorian Culture,” North American Victorian Studies Association, Vancouver, BC, March 2022 

Panel Organizer, “A (Post?)-Secular Genre: Religion, Secularization, and the Nineteenth-Century Novel,” Modern Language Association, Washington DC, January 2022 

“Enfleshing the Ethical: Liturgy in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda,” Modern Language Association, Washington D.C., January 2022 

Pedagogy Roundtable, Teaching Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature, NAVSA Religion and Spiritualities Caucus, May 2021

“Sacralizing Time In a Secular Age: The Liturgical Calendar and John Keble’s Christian Year,” Modern Language Association, Seattle, WA, January 2020

“A (Post?)-Secular Genre: The Realist Novel, Mediation, and Charlotte Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe,” North American Victorian Studies Association, Columbus, OH, October 2019 

Roundtable Seminar, Ecology & Religion in Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference, University of Washington, September 2019

“Liturgical Aesthetics and Secular Excarnation,” Post-Secular Perspectives on Romantic and Victorian Poetry, Duke University, September 2019​

“Wordsworth’s Liturgical Openness,” North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, Providence, RI, June 2018

“The Preservation of Liturgy and the Body in Walter Pater’s Fiction,” North American Victorian Studies Association, Banff, Alberta, November 2017

“Remembering the Revolution: Wordsworth, Benjamin, and Mnemonic Critique,” Nineteenth Century Studies Association, Charleston, SC, February 2017

“Oscar Wilde’s Liturgical Aesthetics in a Secular Age,” Literature and Belief, Provo, UT, November 2016

Courses

• Composition I: Expository Writing
• Composition II: Rhetoric and Research
• Survey of British Literature
• Survey of American Literature
• Shakespeare
• Romantic Literature
• Victorian Literature
• Literary Theory
• Topics in Film