After majoring in Economics at Princeton University (A.B. 1993), I went on to do graduate study in English at The University of Chicago (M.A., 1995; Ph.D., 2001). I specialize in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature and culture, with a particular emphasis on the novel, poetry, intellectual history, gender, ecology, visual culture, and media history. My book Romantic Capabilities: Blake, Scott, Austen and the New Messages of Old Media (Oxford University Press, 2020) looks at the viral circulation of William Blake’s poetry, the importance of Walter Scott’s novels to early immersive media, and the phenomenon of Jane Austen fanfiction. The book argues that popular new media uses of literary texts often activate and make visible ways that the texts were already about their relationship to medium. My earlier book Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History, 1790-1890 uses texts by Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Scott, Austen, Thomas Rowlandson, and various historians to chart the emergence of a feelings-based historical epistemology in the long nineteenth century. My writings on historical reenactments, living history museums, the gender of history, the erotics of historicism, the comic public sphere, and the ethics of the postmodern condition have appeared in various edited collections and journals, including ELH, Representations, Textual Practice, Romantic Circles, and PMLA.

My Ph.D. thesis supervision primarily has been with students working on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novels. Topics include: Romantic novels and the law; Victorian investigative journalism, slum fiction, and liberalism; the Victorian novel's refashioning of Biblical authority; working class audiences and early-nineteenth-century popular literature/theater; and the afterlives of Jane Austen, including in video games. More generally, I am willing to supervise projects devoted to eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature, media, culture, and intellectual history; Romanticism; historiography; the history of the novel; and ecology.

• Romantic Literature and Culture
• Victorian Literature and Culture
• Gender Studies and Masculinity Studies
• Intellectual History
• Media Studies
• Legal History
• Tourism
• Ecocriticism
• Critical theory (especially, historicism and reception)