I’m an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures. My research on sentimentalism, transatlantic slavery, and the British empire has appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and ELH. My monograph, Spectacular Suffering: Witnessing Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic (Virginia, 2016), shows how the ostensible objects of sentimental compassion—enslaved African people—contended with the forces of capitalist abstraction and produced a melancholic counterdiscourse on slavery. Most recently, I contributed “Black People, Enslaved Populations: Registration and Rights in the British Caribbean, 1787-1838” to The People: Belonging, Exclusion, and Democracy, Ed. by Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton (Cambridge UP, 2025); “Varieties of Bondage in the Early Atlantic” to The Cambridge Companion to Early American Literature (2021); “Profit and Power: Literature and the English Commercial Empire, 1651-1714” to  Emergent Nation: Early Modern British Literature in Transition (Cambridge UP, 2019). My special issue of English Language Notes (co-edited with Cristobal Silva) on “Memory, Amnesia, Commemoration” was published in Fall 2019; another special issue of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation on “Empire, Capital, and Climate Change” appeared in 2022.

My current book project, Settling the Earth: Racial Ecologies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture, 1627-1834, is a study of the conjoined histories of changing practices of land use, imperial expansion, and environmental transformation in the Atlantic world. I have published a number of articles and book chapters based on research for the second book, including “Roads, Bridges, and Ports: Infrastructures of Plantation Agriculture in the British Caribbean, 1627-1840,” in The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure: Race, Affect, Environment (Northwestern UP, 2022); “Soil and Enslaved People: Racial Ecologies in the Plantation Economy, 1624-1764,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation (2022); “The Hoe and the Plow: Plantation Labor Under the Somatic Energy Regime, 1760-1838,” in Histories of Science: Natural Philosophy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World​. Eds. Danielle Spratt and David Alff (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2025).

I served on the MLA Forum Executive Committee on Restoration and Early-18th-Century English Literature (2019-2024). In Fall 2023, I was one of the plenary speakers at the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (CSECS) annual meeting in Montreal; in Spring 2025, I will deliver a lecture in the Georgia Colloquium in 18th and 19th Century Literature.

I’m also the editor of Eighteenth-Century Studies, the flagship journal of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS).

Books and Edited Collections

Spectacular Suffering: Witnessing Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic. University of Virginia Press, 2016.

Special issue of English Language Notes (co-edited with Cristobal Silva) on “Memory, Amnesia, Commemoration” (Fall 2019).

Special issue of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation on “Empire, Capital, and Climate Change,” 63.3-4 (Fall-Winter 2022; pub. 2024).

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

“Atlantic,” in The Oxford Handbook of Migration and Literature, eds. Hadji Bakara, Josephine McDonagh, and Charlotte Sussman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2026).  

 “Political Rights and the Printed Word,” Journal of British Studies 63.4 (2025).

“Black People, Enslaved Populations: Registration and Rights in the British Caribbean, 1787-1838,” in The People: Belonging, Exclusion, and Democracy, Eds. Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2025).

“The Hoe and the Plow: Plantation Labor Under the Somatic Energy Regime, 1760-1838,” in Histories of Science: Natural Philosophy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Eds. Danielle Spratt and David Alff (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2025).

“Reinstating Restoration,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 56.1 (2022): 27-32.

“Histories: Literary, Natural, Planetary,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 63. 3-4 (2022; pub. 2024): 153-168.

“Soil and Enslaved People: Racial Ecologies of the Plantation Economy, 1624-1764,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 63.3-4 (2022; pub. 2024): 241-258.

“Roads, Bridges, and Ports: Infrastructures of Plantation Agriculture in the Caribbean,” in The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure: Race, Affect, Environment. Eds. Kelly Rich, Nicole Rizzuto, and Susan Zieger (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2022).

“Varieties of Bondage in the Early British Atlantic,” in The Cambridge Companion to Early American Literature. Ed. Bryce Traister (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

“Profit and Power: Literature and the English Commercial Empire, 1660-1714,” in Emergent Nation: Early Modern British Literature in Transition. Ed. Elizabeth Sauer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

“Filiation to Affiliation: Kinship and Sentiment in Equiano’s Interesting Narrative,” English Literary History 81.3 (2014): 925-956.

“‘A Fixed Melancholy’: Migration, Memory, and the Middle Passage.” Special issue on “The Dispossessed Eighteenth Century,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 55.2-3 (2014): 235-254.

“Spectacle, Spectatorship, and Sympathy in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 45.4 (2012): 475-96.