• B.A., University of California, Irvine, 1981
• M.A., University of California, Irvine, 1984
• Ph.D., University of California, Irvine, 1989

General Fields of Professional Interest

Eighteenth-century novel
Literary theory
Narrative theory
Literature and science
Literature and time

Pedagogical Style

I conduct seminar-style courses. In all courses, students can expect collaborative-learning exercises, peer-editing workshops, and a portfolio assignment concluding with an end-of-semester self-evaluation.

Other Information

Member MLA, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, International Society for the Study of Time, Society for Literature and Science, Phi Beta Kappa.

Book Review Editor for KronoScope: The Journal for the Study of Time ; Production Editor of Times News: The Newsletter for the International Society for the Study of Time.

Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching (2004); Faculty Merit Teaching Award (2005, 2004, 1995); Faculty Merit Research Award (1998); Summer Research Grant (2003, 1996, 1993).

• English 101 (The Craft of Language)
• English 102 (Texts and Contexts)
• English 150 (Artificial Intelligence in Fiction, Fact, and Film)
• English 382 (Literary Theory)
• English 483 (Seminar in Narrative Form, including Narrative and Time)
• English 405 (Eighteenth-Century British Novel)


• English 404 (British Authors: Jane Austen)

• English 416 (Rebellious Women Writers)
• Honors 310 (Women's Writing as Emancipation)
• English 640 (Narrative and Time)

Selected Publications

Time: Limits and Constraints: The Study of Time XIII. Ed. Jo Alyson Parker, Paul Harris, and Christian Steineck. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Includes Jo Alyson Parker, “David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas of Narrative Constraints and Environmental Limits,” 201-17.

Narrative Form and Chaos Theory in Sterne, Proust, Woolf, and Faulkner. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Time and Memory: The Study of Time XII. Ed. Jo Alyson Parker, Michael Crawford, and Paul Harris. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Includes “Preface to Section 1: Inscribing and Forgetting.”

"Teaching Emma's Narratives and the Narrative of Emma." In Approaches to Teaching Jane Austen's Emma. Ed. Marcia Folsom. New York: Modern Language Association, 2004. 141-50.

"The Indeterminate Temporality of Hypertext." In Time and Uncertainty: The Study of Time XI. Ed. Paul A. Harris and Michael Crawford. Leiden: Brill, 2004. 39-57.

"Remembering the Future: Memento, the Reverse Arrow of Time, and the Defects of Memory." KronoScope: Journal for the Study of Time 4:2 (2004): 239-57.

"'The Clockmaker's Outcry': Tristram Shandy and the Complexification of Time." In Disrupted Patterns: On Chaos and Order in the Enlightenment. Ed. Theodore E.D. Braun and John McCarthy. Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000. 147-60.

The Author's Inheritance: Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, and the
Establishment of the Novel. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1998.

"Complicating a Simple Story: Inchbald's Two Versions of Female Power," Eighteenth-Century Studies 30 (1997): 255-70.

"Spiraling Down 'the Gutter of Time': Tristram Shandy and the Strange Attractor of Death." Weber Studies 14 (1997): 102-14.

“Strange Attractors in Absalom, Absalom!" in Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology. Ed. Joseph Tabbi and Michael Wutz. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. 99-118.

"'Gendering the Robot: Stanislaw Lem's 'The Mask,'" Science-Fiction Studies 19 (1992): 178-91

"Pride and Prejudice: Jane Austen's Double Inheritance Plot," REAL: The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 7 (1990): 159-190.