My dissertation explores attitudes toward and expressions of "vulgarity" in the fiction of Henry James (1843–1916) and Edith Wharton (1862–1937) across the broader fin de siècle period. I focus on how this word has developed to become increasingly evocative of cultural anxieties in regard to declining aesthetic taste, manners and civility, as well as education, within a transatlantic, primarily Anglo-American, turn-of-the-century historical context. The project advances a view of James and Wharton as two authors disconcerted by signs of shifting nexus of economic and cultural capital away from Europe toward the United States, and as cosmopolitan mediators of a diverse Euro-American literary heritage.

More generally, my research interests include—but are not restricted to—the relationship of aesthetic taste to class, social mobility, and cultural hierarchies, both as it finds expression in fictional representations such as the novel and other cultural texts.