I am an associate professor at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where I specialize in eighteenth-century culture, law and literature, and the history and theory of the novel. I also currently serve as deputy chair.

I am co-editor of Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe and His Contemporaries and chair of the Columbia Seminar in Eighteenth-Century European Culture. For the 2022-23 academic year, I was a Transformative Learning in the Humanities Mellon Fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center.

I grew up on the Chesapeake Bay, and received my PhD from Johns Hopkins University. I still put Old Bay on everything. (Yes, everything.) I was a postdoctoral fellow in the “Form and Formalisms” seminar at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University. In 2016, I participated in the NEH summer institute on “Postsecularism and the Rise of the Novel” at the University of Iowa. I also recently took part in the 2022 Project Narrative Summer Institute on “Foundations and Innovations.”

I live with my family in Jersey City, New Jersey. For no good reason at all, I own 23 different well-loved paperback copies of Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews.