Before attending Boston College Dan earned his B.A. and M.A. at Georgetown University, both in English. He is primarily interested in the Bildungsroman and modernism, and is pursuing the connections between those fields of interest, specifically with regard to development of the individual under colonial systems. Within Bildungsroman studies, Dan centers aging and development in his writing. He also studies the development of the novel throughout its history, and narrative theories. In the field of Irish Studies, Dan focuses on the Irish novel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly those written by Elizabeth Bowen and James Joyce.