I am a scholar of British and Anglophone literature with a focus on the intersection of cultural geography, visuality, and social identity. My work explores how literature treats space not merely as a setting, but as a powerful engine for defining gender, race, and class. Across three book projects, I have traced this relationship from “threshold” spaces of imperial London (Threshold Modernism, 2019) to vast patterns of gendered geography found across 20,000 digitized texts (Gender and Literary Geography, 2025). As the editor of Space and Literary Studies (2025), I have further examined the field’s turn toward spatiality, foregrounding how material environments and power relations are fundamentally intertwined.

As an associate professor of English, with affiliate appointments in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and in the Institute for AI and Data Science, I employ both archival history and computational methods to map the relationship between space and authority. Whether analyzing the “reverse imperial ethnography” of colonial writers in London or using large-scale text analysis to debunk myths about gendered landscapes, my research reveals how mobility and visuality shape the modern world. I am currently investigating the ethical implications of the aerial view in twentieth-century literature and culture, exploring how the view from above transformed our regard for others. Collectively, these projects argue that how we represent space—from a park bench to an airplane cockpit—is essential to how we navigate power and belonging.

My work has appeared or is forthcoming in the journals ELH, Modern Fiction Studies, Modernism/modernity, Literature Compass, Cultural Analytics, Journal of Computational Literary Studies, and Twentieth-Century Literature, 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 write and teach at Wayne State University, in Detroit. I previously taught at Cornell, Notre Dame, Penn State-DuBois, Wake Forest University, and, as a graduate student, 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.

More detailed descriptions of my various work projects follow.

Threshold Modernism: New Public Women and the Literary Spaces of Imperial London (Cambridge University Press, 2019; paperback 2021), examines gendered identities and transitional spaces in British and colonial narratives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By revealing the co-evolution of controversial sites, like women’s clubs, shops and department stores, and city streets, with new types of modern women, the book argues that these women and their associated spaces stood in for larger cultural changes, even for modernity itself, and provided an apt metaphor for writers struggling to describe new subjects, experiences, and ways of seeing in appropriately novel ways.

My second book, Gender and Literary Geography (Cambridge University Press, 2025), extends the study of gender and space. Co-authored with Matthew Wilkens and carried out in partnership with the NEH-sponsored Textual Geographies project, the book 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 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 evolving role of space as a concept in literary studies is the subject of Space and Literary Studies, of which I am the editor (Cambridge University Press, 2025). My introduction argues that literary studies has increasingly turned to space and, fueled by feminist and postcolonial insights, to the interconnections between material spaces and power relations. In twenty-one chapters by an international team of scholars, the book 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.

A cluster of essays caries forward my work on colonial authors in imperial London that I began in Threshold Modernism. “Reverse Imperial Ethnography and C. L. R. James’s London Writing” (Modernism/ modernity, 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. “Nation, Ethnicity, and the Geography of British Fiction, 1880-1940” (co-authored with Matthew Wilkens, Cultural Analytics, 2018) uses computational methods to study many thousands of books published in Britain 1880-1940. It reveals distinctive geographic features in writing by foreign-born writers of color, findings that I respond to and extend in “Alternative Geographies and Urban Parks: Duse Mohamed Ali and Yoshio Markino in Imperial London” (ELH, 2026). Here I argue that these neglected but once well-known authors of imperial London negotiated racialized spatial and social divisions by constructing alternative geographies, a key feature of which were urban parks. Ali and Markino’s representations of iconic British sites and of London’s parks transformed imperial London into spaces of belonging and reveal urban parks’ underappreciated importance as spaces for connection with strangers.

I am currently at work on a book about aircraft and aerial views in twentieth-century literature. 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. Provisionally titled “Aircraft and Aerial Views: Regarding Others in the Age of Flight,” the book project explores how the arrival of powered flight ushered in new ways of seeing others that shaped – and continue to shape – the literature and culture of Britain and beyond. The first glimmers of this research project appeared in an essay on “Air War, Propaganda, and Woolf’s Anti-Tyranny Aesthetic” (Modern Fiction Studies, 2013). A new facet of this work is forthcoming in “Winifred Holtby and the Aerial View” (Twentieth-Century Literature).

You can use the form below to contact me.