I work on British and Anglophone literature with special attention to modernism, space, visuality, and mobility. Gender studies, critical race theory, and cultural geography inform my work. I am the author of Threshold Modernism: New Public Women and the Literary Spaces of Imperial London (Cambridge University Press, 2019; paperback 2021), which examines gendered identities and transitional spaces in British and colonial narratives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this book, I argue that writing of the era (from B. M. Malabari to Virginia Woolf) was shaped by widespread debates about women’s increasing public presence as workers and pleasure-seekers in the city.

Since the publication of Threshold Modernism, my work on space and literature expanded into three distinct new projects. The first project, in partnership with the NEH-sponsored Textual Geographies project, uses computational methods to consider broader patterns in gender, British literature, and cultural geography over two centuries and across a corpus of over 20,000 digitized literary texts. Gender and Literary Geography (Cambridge University Press, 2025), which I co-authored with Matthew Wilkens, discusses what we discovered, the methods we used, and the implications of our findings in particular texts. Related collaborative work using computational methods has explored the roles of national origin and ethnicity in British literary geography and, in English-language fiction broadly, characters’ locations and mobility.

The second project is an edited volume on Space and Literary Studies, part of the Cambridge Critical Concepts series of Cambridge University Press (2025). With an introduction and twenty-one chapters by an international team of contributors, the volume examines the evolving role of space as a concept in literary studies. It treats the emergence and development of foundational theories in spatial literary studies alongside emergent approaches and emphasizes how space is intertwined with the production and circulation of power.

The third project takes the form of a cluster of articles about race, gender, and quasi-public space in imperial London. “Reverse Imperial Ethnography and C. L. R. James’s London Writing” (Modernism/modernity 28.2, April 2021) analyses the neglected London essays of anticolonialist C.L.R. James in the context of his fiction and the multiple demands of metropolitan culture. It finds them an exemplary instance of “reverse imperial ethnography,” a mode of writing common among colonial authors of color who claimed their places in London by figuring themselves as participant observers. “Alternative Geographies and Urban Parks” (ELH, forthcoming Winter 2026) examines the role of British urban green spaces in the work of two neglected but once well-known authors of imperial London, Egyptian writer, editor, and activist Duse Mohamed Ali and Japanese writer and painter Yoshio Markino. I suggest that Ali and Markino’s representations of iconic British sites and of London’s parks transformed imperial London into spaces of belonging. By revealing urban parks’ underappreciated importance as spaces for connection with strangers, their work also sheds new light British literary history and its canon of major authors including Virginia Woolf. Woolf is the focus of a third essay, “The Promises and Limits of Virginia Woolf’s London Parks” (forthcoming 2026).

I am currently at work on a book about air power and aerial views in British and Anglophone writing. The invention of the airplane transformed the possibilities for communication and travel, but it also introduced new modes of warfare and imperial control. In this project, I explore how the airplane held in tension new ways of seeing others: freedom from the limitations of earth-bound, parochial perspectives and a dangerous sense of mastery derived from a view from above. The first glimmers of this research project appeared in an essay on “Air War, Propaganda, and Woolf’s Anti-Tyranny Aesthetic” (Modern Fiction Studies 59.1, 2013).

My work has appeared or is forthcoming in the journals ELH, Modern Fiction Studies, Modernism/modernity, Literature Compass, Cultural Analytics, and Journal of Computational Literary Studies, as well as in edited collections on Amy Levy, George Gissing, and Virginia Woolf.

I have held leadership roles in several international societies. As Program Chair for the Modernist Studies Association, I led the organization of its annual conference for three years, 2020-2023, and served on the board. I was on the advisory board of The Space Between Society 2014-2020, helped to host its 2015 conference, and was the Book Review Editor of its journal, The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945, from 2020 to 2023. I have served on the advisory board of the International Virginia Woolf Society since 2012 and co-edited (with Sarah Cornish) the 2009 selected conference proceedings, Woolf and the City (2010).

I am an associate professor of English at Wayne State University, in Detroit. I previously taught at Cornell, Notre Dame, Penn State-DuBois, Wake Forest University, and, as a graduate student, the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At these varied institutions, I have designed and taught 39 distinct courses at every level of university education, which you will find briefly described on the Teaching page.

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