After graduating with an A. B. from Harvard University, he studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He then earned his Ph.D. from Yale University. Before coming to Stanford, he was an Associate Professor of English at Yale and an Associate Professor of History and Literature at Harvard. He is the author of Mammon's Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton; What Was Tragedy? Theory and the Early Modern Canon; and numerous articles on Milton, literary and cultural responses to nascent capitalism, early modern theater, and theories of tragedy.