Most broadly, I write on how media ecologies impact aesthetic forms, most recently the Gothic and Melodrama. A British Academy Global Professorship (2020-24) has made my most recent research and published work possible.

With Angela Wright, I am General Editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ann Radcliffe; my edition of The Italian will launch the series later this year. 2026 should see the launch of a comprehensive performance database on Romantic Melodrama, which Penn alumna Dr. Deven Parker (Leverhume Fellow, University of Glasgow) and I are designing.

My books include Romanticism and the Gothic (Cambridge, 2000) and Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry (Cambridge 2017). Collaborative monographs include (with the Multigraph Collective) Interacting with Print: Modes of Reading in the Age of Print Saturation (Chicago, 2018), and (with Diego Saglia of the University of Parma) A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Age of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2019).

My work on genre and canon formation includes several editions and anthologies, including Women's Travel Writing in India: Volume 2: Harriet Newell's Memoirs and Eliza Fay's Letters (Pickering and Chatto, 2021, co-edited with Katrina O'Loughlin of Brunel University of London), Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800 (Broadview, 2008, co-edited with Dahlia Porter, University of Glasgow), Charlotte Smith's Manon L'Escaut and the Romance of Real Life (Pickering and Chatto, 2005), The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama (Broadview, 2003, co-edited with Jeffrey Cox), and Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (Penguin, 2002).

Essays on poetic collections, performing animals, it-narratives, stage explosions, the Gothic, book history, Jane Austen, melodrama and dramas of spectacle, gender and performance, periodicals, slavery and war, early novel canons, authorship, and pornography have appeared in MLQ, PMLA, Novel, ELH, European Romantic Review, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, SEL, Studies in Romanticism, Theatre Survey, and other journals.

While at Penn I've been fortunate to be the recipient of the Ira Abrams, Lindback, College of General Studies, David Delaura, and Alan Filreis awards for distinguished teaching.