A Rational Millennium: Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-Century England and America (Oxford University Press, 1987).
Author of Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (Verso Books, 2000). Winner of the 2002 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize.
Edited Volumes
Editor of Pamphlet Wars: Prose in the English Revolution (Frank Cass, 1992)
Selected Articles
“Black Abdiel and the Higher Law: James Monroe Whitfield vs. the Fillmore Faction,” ELH vol. 90, no. 1, Spring 2023. Winner of the 2025 Isocrates Award of the Milton Society of America. . . .
“Shoot and Cry: Realism, Modernism, and the Iraq War Fiction of Justin Sirois and Kevin Powers.” Cultural Critique, no. 104, 2020.
“‘Mr. Kayerts. He is Dead’: Literary Realism and Conrad's Outpost of Progress.” ELH, vol. 85, no. 1, Spring 2018.
“Buffalo Unsteeled: Connie Porter, Leslie Feinberg, and the Persistence of Proletarian Fiction.” The Journal of English Language and Literature (JELL), vol. 63, no. 1, 2017.
“‘Nasty, nasty’: Incest, Islamism, and History in Hadji Murat.” Tolstoy Studies, vol. 28, 2016.
“Antigone Becomes Jocasta: Soha Bechara, Résistante, and Incendies.” Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group, vol. 29, no. 1, Fall 2015.
“Utopia Pre-Empted: Kett’s Rebellion, Commoning, and the Hysterical Sublime.” Historical Materialism, vol. 16, no. 3, 2008.
“The Spider, the Fly, and the Commonwealth: John Heywood and Agrarian Class Struggle.” ELH, vol. 71, no. 1, Spring 2004.
“‘God bless thee, little David!’: John Felton and His Allies,” ELH, vol. 59, no. 3, Autumn 1992.
“‘Will you rent our ancient love asunder?’: Lesbian Elegy in Donne, Marvell, and Milton.” ELH, vol. 54, no. 4, Winter 1987.
“Tragic Superfluity in Coriolanus.” ELH 50.3, Autumn 1983.
Major Awards and Fellowships
1990-1991: NEH Fellowship
2002: Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize for Ehud’s Dagger.
Works in Progress
An essay on Alice Childress’s 1958 play Copra.
An essay on Alice Childress‘s writings on Black culture and Black, White, and Red solidarity during the Blacklist.
A collection of Alice Childress’s unpublished and unrepublished drama, fiction, and criticism.
An essay on Simone de Beauvoir, Nawal el Saadawi, and marxist feminism.
An essay on Kang Kyŏng-ae and social reproduction.
Essays on the realist socialist-feminist fiction of Palestinian novelist Sahar Khalifeh.
Essays on the modernist settler-colonial fiction of Israeli novelist S. Yizhar.
An essay on the Alabama communist sharecropper Ned Cobb.
An essay on Freud, sexual assault, and Milton’s Eve