Activities and Interests

My main research and teaching field is Restoration and eighteenth-century British literature, including the rise of the novel, theater history, periodical journalism, and print history. Recent teaching in other areas: contemporary British fiction, representations of class and criminality, early modern French and English epistolary novels, Jane Austen. I am part of the Textual Studies Program faculty. Current scholarship: a book entitled Lowlife: Representations of Social Inferiority in Britain, 1660-1830, and a volume on The Life of Jonathan Swift for the Blackwell “Critical Biography” series. I was appointed as the UW faculty Katz Distinguished Lecturer for 2014-15.