RESEARCH
Overview
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.
The Art of Uncertainty: Probable Realism and the Victorian Novel, my first book, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2024 (Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture).
I'm 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.
I edited a special issue of Poetics Today (2020), with Jeffrey Blevins, on “Logic and Literary Form.”
I edited a special issue of Literature Compass (2024), with Jacob Risinger, 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 20th-century English Bildungsroman; and on animal ethics and ecological themes in South African literature.