ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½

I work on literatures of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglophone Atlantic world, with emphases in print culture, diaspora studies, settler colonialism, and women’s writing.  I’m interested in how authors distant from centers of literary power, whether geographically or ideologically, got their work into print. My books include Mary Prince, Slavery, and Print Culture in the Anglophone Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Scottish Women’s Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century: the Romance of Everyday Life (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Nation and Migration: the Making of British Atlantic Literature, 1765-1830 (Oxford University Press, 2016), and Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity, 1745-1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2010).  My research has been supported by grants and fellowships from Fulbright, the NEH, the Beinecke Library, the Clark Library, and the Ohio State University ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ for Historical Research.

Currently, I’m working on a biography of Margaret Oliphant, a novelist and literary critic whose career illuminates the transformation of reading and writing from pastimes to a profession for Victorian women.  I’m also involved in a number of collaborative projects: with Gretchen Woertendyke (U of South Carolina, Columbia), I’m editing a collection of essays on Walter Scott’s influence on American literature and culture; with Sharon Alker (Whitman College), Leith Davis (Simon Fraser U), and Holly Faith Nelson (Trinity Western U), I’m editing a volume titled Unsettling Scottish Studies, which grows out of a conference we organized on the same topic; and with Scott Lyall (Edinburgh Napier U), I’m editing the Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Novel.

At ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ I hold the Kahn Professorship in the Humanities.  My teaching ranges from courses introducing the fundamentals of literary study to seminars on Jane Austen; How Romantic Poets Invented Nature; and Atlantic World Narratives of Bondage and Freedom; among other topics.