Professor of English Literature

I am the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of English Literature at Harvard University, where I arrived in 2014, following two decades of teaching at large, under-funded public universities both in the United States and my native Canada.

At Harvard I teach courses on, among other things, the era “When Novels Were New”; on Jane Austen, the literary fan cultures of her moment, and the fan cultures she focuses at our moment; on the history of reading and the politics of literacy and literacy instruction; on “Book Theory”; and on the Gothic tradition in literature and film. I am particularly fond of teaching the gateway course to the English concentration and English secondary degree, “Literary Forms,” but—should you wonder about my favorite course—well, it is inevitably the one that I’m teaching at that moment, just as my favorite Austen novel is inevitably the one that I’m teaching at that moment. Harvard’s graduating classes have on five occasions selected me as one of their “favorite professors,” and in 2021 I was appointed Harvard College Professor in recognition of my excellence in undergraduate teaching.

At Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center I co-convene the seminars on Novel Theory and on the History of the Book.

In my recent scholarship, I often work at the intersection of literary criticism and the history of the book, in particular the book in pieces—the notes, scraps, and paper slips that overrun the boundaries and challenge the fixity and finitude of the printed codex. Another current project has seen me exploring how the history of fictionality has been shaped by and shapes the history of belief—the Enlightenment invention of the category of religion and the Enlightenment practice of believing in other people’s believing included. I’ve written about blank books, pins in books, handwritten copies of printed books, ephemera, and paper art and craft. I’ve also written extensively about the history of the British novel—from Daniel Defoe to Horace Walpole to Jane Austen to Mary Shelley to Walter Scott to Henry James to Ali Smith. And I have a continuing interest in textual editing, having prepared editions of two Austen novels, of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, as well as four editions, co-edited with Jack Stillinger and, later, with Eric Eisner, of the Romantic-period volume of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. You can find out more about my past publications and current projects here.

The research program that funnelled into these publications has been supported by numerous awards, including fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. My first book was honored in 1999 by the First Book Award given by the Modern Language Association. At the start of 2024, the Keats-Shelley Association of America awarded me its Distinguished Scholar Award for lifetime achievement.