My work addresses British literature of the long 19th century in relation to science, philosophy, and intellectual history. I also work on the literature of South and Southern Africa.

My first book, The Art of Uncertainty: Probable Realism and the Victorian Novel, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2024, in the series Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture.

I'm also working on a second book about the relationship between weather/climate and social form in 19th-century Britain and its empire, which examines literary, scientific, and social theory materials.

With Jeffrey Blevins, I edited a special issue of Poetics Today (2020) on “Logic and Literary Form.”

​With Jacob Risinger, I edited a special issue of Literature Compass (2024) on “Collecting, Collectors, and Collections in the Nineteenth Century.”

Among other topics, I have written articles on rumor in the novel; on cloud studies, meteorology, and theories of political liberty; on the poetry and poetics of evolutionary theory and its opponents; on the relationship between Victorian logic and theories of genre; on the law of accident; on deception and the mid-20th-century English Bildungsroman; and on animal ethics and ecological themes in South African literature.