"Over the past twenty years, I have been teaching a range of English literature classes at Stanford, from Shakespeare to Modern Poetry, such as Poetry & Poetics, Modern Poetry, Romantic Poetry, and the illuminated poetry of William Blake. I have a cat named Christabel (the title of a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge) and had another named Percy (after the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley) until he met his fate in the form of a hungry coyote last year.

"I have published a number of books, most recently a biography of the poet John Keats and his brother George, titled The Keats Brothers. I am currently completing The Book Madness: A Story of Book Collectors in America and The Mental Traveller: William Blake, which studies the poet in the context of late-medieval and Renaissance iconography. I am also writing a book on animal poems and look forward to teaching this class."