I am a tenured faculty member in the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of South Carolina, where I promote the use of library materials through courses, research, exhibits, and events.

My background is in Comparative Literature, and I specialize in British and French literature and culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Romanticism, the history of the novel, and the history of the book. My book, Vicarious Narratives: A Literary History of Sympathy, 1750-1850 (Oxford University Press, 2019). It focuses on novelistic form, transmissions of feeling, and identity and identification. It argues that Romantic-era fiction redefines sympathy as an experience of narrative that struggles to overcome differences of nationality, race, or species. I am also the director of The Digital Piranesi, an enhanced digital edition of the complete works of the visual artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi. An article about the project and its connections to British Romanticism, “Romanticism’s Media and the Digital Piranesi,” was named the best article of 2024 in the journal Studies in Romanticism. In addition to that large-scale project, current and forthcoming work includes essays on Ignatius Sancho’s correspondence with Laurence Sterne, historical marginalia in library collections, and botany’s influence on the printed forms of Romantic poetry.

Teaching in a rare books library has allowed me to design interdisciplinary courses focused on rare and unique materials such as historical marginalia in rare books (especially a copy of Lyrical Ballads owned by a friend of William Wordsworth’s, or Sylvia Plath’s copy of The Great Gatsby), and informative images (such as maps, diagrams, and charts). I have received the Michael J. Mungo Undergraduate Teaching award and the Honors College’s student-selected Outstanding Faculty Award.