Areas of Specialization

eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American literature, the history of the novel, transatlanticism, transnationalism, 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.  In Nation and Migration: The Making of British Atlantic Literature, 1765-1835 (Oxford University Press, 2016), I examine 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.  I contend 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. My interest in migration also informs one of my current projects, Mary Prince and Provincial Print Culture in the Anglophone Atlantic World. This project traces the intersecting migrations of Mary Prince, a slave, and Thomas Pringle and Susanna Strickland Moodie, the two writers who brought Prince's narrative to British readers in 1831.  It examines how Pringle's and Moodie's experiences of dispossession and displacement may have informed their presentation of Prince's history, and how Prince's history in turn informed their understandings of the effects of British migration on Black and Indigenous peoples in the Anglophone Atlantic world.

I'm also completing a book titled The Romance of Everyday Life: Scottish women's writing in the long nineteenth century, which draws on my research as a Fulbright scholar at the National Library of Scotland in 2016-17.  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.  I've created a website introducing some of these little known Scotswomen here.