I am an Associate Professor in the English Department of Stanford University, as well as Director of Graduate Studies for English. Previously, I was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and a Visiting Lecturer at MIT, following my graduate work in Yale University's English Department.
My research focuses on the history of the novel, and although most of my work connects in some way to Anglo-American modernism, I pursue far-flung connections everywhere from 19th-century Russian and British authors to later 20th-century African and African-American literature. Lately, I've also been working on today's television and the relationship between literature and climate change
My interest is in the transhistorical afterlives of literary works: the ways in which literary objects addressed to their own presents later become part of other, more recent histories. I examine the connections between the intimate temporalities of reading----the time it takes to get through a novel----and the broad temporalities of reception across decades. I’m especially interested in questions of literary futurity: how forms of anticipation specific to literary art—of a future audience, of what happens next—connect to larger political, ethical, and historical questions.
I grew up in Seattle, and lived all over New England for a decade before returning to the West Coast in 2016 to start at Stanford.
You may reach me at bronstein at stanford dot edu.