丁香园AV

Areas of interest

My research focuses on 19th-century American literature and book history, especially the history of publishing and copyright. I鈥檝e held fellowships at the Huntington Library, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Bibliographical Society of America, and my articles have appeared in Early American Literature, Legacy, ESQ, Style, and the New England Quarterly, as well as in edited collections, including Edgar Allan Poe in Context. My first book, The Grand Chorus of Complaint: Authors and the Business Ethics of American Publishing, was published by Oxford University Press in 2011, and my edition of Herman Melville鈥檚 Billy Budd, Sailor was published by Broadview in 2016. With Robert Spoo (Princeton University), I鈥檓 currently finishing a new book on the 鈥渃ourtesy of the trade,鈥� the informal intellectual property norm that structured 19th-century American and British (and even Canadian) publishing in the absence of international copyright, and I鈥檝e also been writing recently on religion and postsecularism in the early U.S. I鈥檓 one of the general editors of the new Broadview Anthology of American Literature.

I teach primarily pre-20th-century American literature and book history, though I sometimes drift into later periods and other traditions as well. In Fall 2024 I鈥檓 teaching a graduate-level introduction to book history (Engl. 820) and an undergraduate course on Moby-Dick (Engl. 437W). In the Spring I鈥檓 teaching two upper-level undergraduate courses, one on poetry, painting, and intermediality (Engl. 363), and one on histories, theories, and practices of reading, in which we read everything from Italo Calvino鈥檚 If on a Winter鈥檚 Night a Traveler to Mark L. Danielewski鈥檚 House of Leaves to Ruth Ozeki鈥檚 A Tale for the Time Being (Engl. 415W).

Education

• BA (Honours), James Madison University (Virginia)
• MA, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
• PhD, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill