Areas of Specialization

eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American literature, the history of the novel, transatlanticism, women's writing, diaspora studies

Activities and Interests

I work on the on the intersections among nationality, gender, and race in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American literature. My first book, Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity, 1745-1820, examined the literary creation of a British national identity in the century following the political union of England and Scotland. While working on this project, I was struck by the fact that although scholars (including myself) have argued extensively for literature's role in forming national identities during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they have paid little attention to works written by those excluded--whether by force or choice--from processes of nation formation during this period. My My second book, Nation and Migration: The Making of British Atlantic Literature, 1765-1835, published earlier this year by Oxford University Press, is the fruit of this observation.   Nation and Migration examines writing by and about British migrants to North America during the politically volatile era when Britain's American colonies broke away to become the United States.  It contends that late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary representations of transatlantic migration and settlement, whether from the position of migrant or observer, reveal the extreme tenuousness and fragility of both Britain and the United States as relatively new national entities at the time. 

I have been awarded a Fulbright grant at the National Library of Scotland and a visting fellowship at Edinburgh University's Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities to work on my current project, a book tentatively titled The Romance of Everyday Life: Scottish Women's Writing, 1815-1939. In the nineteenth century, Scottish writers from Walter Scott to Robert Louis Stevenson created the romanticized version of Scotland that still dominates popular representations of the country today.  This is the Scotland of Outlander—a Scotland of sublime Highland landscapes, stalwart heroes, and kilted ruffians.  My research on nineteenth-century Scottish literature has revealed an overlooked literary tradition of realistic counter-representations in works by women writers—from stories of mundane domestic life in villages where nothing ever happens to accounts of grinding poverty in Glasgow’s slums.  These women’s works provide a corrective to a literary and historical perspective that associates Scotland with romance and emotion, and England with realism and reason.