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I research nineteenth-century American literature and book history, especially the history of publishing and copyright. I’ve 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’s Billy Budd, Sailor was published by Broadview in 2016. With Robert Spoo (Princeton University), I’m currently finishing a book on “courtesy of the trade,” the extralegal intellectual property norm that helped structure nineteenth-century American, British, and even Canadian publishing in the absence of international copyright law. I’ve also been writing recently on religion and postsecularism in the early U.S. Finally, I’m a General Editor of the new Broadview Anthology of American Literature. 

I teach primarily pre-1900 American literature and book history, though I sometimes drift into later periods and other traditions, usually Victorian British. I’m on research leave for the 2025-26 academic year.