I am a lecturer in the Department of English at Harvard University, where I teach eighteenth-century and Romantic literatures and coordinate Harvard’s first-year humanities course, Humanities 10. Broadly, my research and teaching focus on British literature and history, c.a. 1650-1850; book history, bibliography, and media studies; queer and trans histories; and the history and theory of the novel from its origins to the present.
I am currently working on two book projects. The first—Ephemeral History: Documentary Form and the Everyday in the British Novel, 1720-1850–rereads the emergence of the British novel in relation to the late 17th- and 18th-century interest in preserving media that had been designed to be quickly discarded. In doing so, this project shows how the novel served as a key site for imagining how to read ephemeral documents like almanacs and newspapers as histories of everyday life.
The second project (tentatively titled “Transitions by the Book: Print and the Making of Gender in 19th century Britain”) connects my work on early media with a broader interest in trans and queer historicisms. More specifically, it traces how notions of authorship and aspects of material texts—including page layout and bibliographical format—functioned as early technologies of gender transition, with two broader aims: to recover and reexamine pre-1850 print productions of individual gender nonconforming authors, and to develop a new, broader account of the gendering of pre-1850 print by combining methods from bibliography and trans studies.
Before coming to Harvard, I received my BA in English from Indiana University, and worked as an editorial assistant for Indiana University Press. I’ve also shared work in Romanticism with the public as a communications fellow for the Keats-Shelley Association of America; twice co-organized the Harvard-Yale-Brown Graduate Conference in Book History; and for several years co-ran both the 18th century and Romanticism colloquium and the Dialectical Thinking in the Humanities Reading group at Harvard. I am also currently a junior fellow with the Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School