About My Research:

The book I am currently finishing, The Racialization of Print (forthcoming with the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture and UNC Press), was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Humanities for the 2024-2025 academic year. It traces the historical emergence of the belief that a single book, by virtue of its author’s racial identity, can reveal profound truths about an entire race of people. I begin in the early modern period, with the spread of printing in Europe and the rise of modern racial categories, and end in the nineteenth century, with the industrialization of print and the codification of scientific racism.

Drawing on a decade of archival research, as well as the works of authors like John Smith, Mary Rowlandson, Phillis Wheatley, Baron de Vastey, William Apess, and Frederick Douglass, this project offers a corrective to our still common desire to approach books with assumptions about extracting racial knowledge. For an overview of the project’s argument and a case-study involving Wheatley and Samson Occom, see my 2020 essay in American Literary History.

My next book project is a short work for a popular audience that asks what we can learn from writers and activists of the Age of Revolution if we consider them not with the rigidity of our modern pieties, but instead with sympathy and grace. It consists of four sketches of the careers and writings of Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Toussaint Louverture — with a focus on how they used media to change the world.

My first book, London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800-1850 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), considered Romantic-era authors from Ireland, Scotland, and the United States, who sought the prestige and exposure that only publishers in London could provide.

I have published dozens of essays in scholarly journals: many are available here.

My research has been supported with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Carter Brown Library, the American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Huntington Library, the Newberry Library, the Bibliographical Society of America, and the Keats-Shelley Association of America.