I am a literary critic specializing in British Romanticism (ca. 1770-1840) across genres, with particular interests in persuasion and rhetoric, cognition, epistemology, and literary theory. What unites these interests is the question of literature’s role in representing and eliciting new ethical and political sensibilities—a question that often involves consideration of the period’s emergent scientific psychology and revolutionary social and political movements, and always involves attention to the distinctive work of literary language, genre, and form.
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I am an Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame and have held research fellowships at the National Humanities Center (USA) and Chawton House (England), as well as doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (at the University of Cambridge and at York University respectively). Before pursuing graduate studies in English, I studied journalism and interned at Time, the Globe and Mail, Canadian Geographic, and the Networks of Centres of Excellence (a research-funding initiative of the Canadian government). As a research assistant to the Canadian Senator Joan Fraser (Lib.), I also worked on a Senate study of the Canadian news media.

Current projects include a book on the poetics of perspective in the nineteenth-century age of empire, the editorship of volume 5 (1800-1900) of a six-volume Cultural History of Rhetoric for Bloomsbury, and articles on Mary Wollstonecraft, William Hazlitt, Percy Shelley, and Mary Shelley. With Brian McGrath, I co-edit the Romantic Circles Praxis series of peer-reviewed critical volumes.