As of January 2025, I am an Associate Professor in the English Department of Johns Hopkins University. From 2016 through 2024, I was an Assistant then Associate Professor in the English Department of Stanford University; 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. My main project at the moment looks at how the form of the novel in English has been shaped by its representation of violent political activism. I also have research interests in the relationship between literature and climate change, as well as the narrative form of modern television.
My overarching 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 jhu dot edu.