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 University Press, 2024); “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” will appear in 2023.

My current book project, Expendable Lives, Disposable Lands: Racial Ecologies in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture, 1627-1834, is a study of the conjoined histories of capitalist modernity, imperial expansion, and climate change within the context of plantation agriculture. 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, 2023); “Soil and Enslaved People: Racial Ecologies in the Plantation Economy, 1624-1764,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation (2023); “The Hoe and the Plough: Plantation Labor Under the Somatic Energy Regime, 1760-1838,” in Science and Storytelling in the Eighteenth Century: Knowledge, Narrative, Discipline. Eds. Danielle Spratt and David Alff (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2024).

I serve on the MLA Forum Executive Committee on Restoration and Early- 18th-Century English Literature (2019-2024). In Fall 2022, I was one of the plenary speakers at the North Eastern Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (NEASECS) annual meeting; in Spring 2023, I will deliver a lecture in the Tudor and Stuart series in the Department of English at Johns Hopkins University.

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” (2023). 

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

“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, 2024).

“The Hoe and the Plough: Labor, Agrarian Technology, and Race in the British Caribbean, 1760-1838,” in Science and Storytelling in the Eighteenth Century: Knowledge, Narrative, Discipline. Eds. Danielle Spratt and David Alff (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2024).

“Soil and Enslaved People: Racial Ecologies in the Plantation Economy, 1624-1764,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation (2023).

“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, 2023).

“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.