My research focuses on the history and theory of the novel, particularly in the long eighteenth century. This work is informed by formalist and feminist literary theory.

My academic writing has appeared in venues such as NOVEL, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and Eighteenth-Century Studies.

I am interested in questions of form across literature and culture. Currently, I am working on a book about the intersection of literary and legal personhood and another—for a wider audience—about Jane Austen as storyteller (forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press in 2026).

With Katarzyna Bartoszynska, I am currently editing two journal special issues on free indirect discourse.

born yesterday: inexperience and the early realist novel

“Intelligent and sharply stylish.” — Jenny Davidson

“The finest study of literary character in a generation.” — Jonathan Kramnick

“An exciting, original reassessment of the relationship between plot and character in realism” —Deidre Lynch

“It is the rare and best kind of monograph that makes you laugh!” — Novel

“Intellectually serious but also gracefully playful in a way uncommon in academic writing.” — LARB

“Most likely to make a lasting impact on the way we think about eighteenth-century novels . . . handsome, humanely written and accessible . . . cheerfully revisionary. . .” Times Literary Supplement

“Lively and brimming with wit.” — Eighteenth-Century Studies

“This exciting and invigorating work of scholarship will doubtless prove beneficial both to researchers and to teachers.” — Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility

My edition of Sense and Sensibility (1811) was published with W.W. Norton’s Norton Library series in August, 2024. It includes a new introduction and afterword, along with explanatory notes.

You can find links to my Norton Library podcast appearances about both editions at the “public writing/media” tab above.

Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs

I contributed a conversation with Brandy Jensen to an edition of Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), published in the Smith & Taylor Classics line by Unnamed Press in 2024.

selected essays:

“Clarissa by the Numbers: Novel Experience and the Aesthetics of Quantification,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction (2023)

“The Incest Plot: Marriage, Closure, and the Novel’s Endogamy,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation (2020)

“Clarissa’s Conjectural History: The Novel and the Novice,” in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation (2015)

“When Experience Matters: Tom Jones and ‘Virtue Rewarded’,” in Novel (2014)

Jane Austen’s Emma

My edition of Jane Austen’s Emma (1815) was published in W.W. Norton’s Norton Library series in April 2022. It includes a new introduction and afterword, along with explanatory notes.

I’ve visited a number of classrooms and book groups to discuss editing Austen. If you’d like me to visit your group, drop me a line through the contact page.