Background

Joe specializes in nineteenth-century British literature and its relationship to religion and secularization. Currently, he is writing a book on how 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

“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

“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