Recent & Upcoming

A discussion of Dangerous Liaisons, Letters and Epistolary Novels with Sir Christopher Hampton

August 2025 |The Meighen Forum at the Stratford Festival. Stratford, Ontario

Science, Scissors-work, and Mary Delany’s Flora Delanica.

May 2025 |Surfacing Craft in the Archive. Houghton Library.

Papyromania: Women, Books, and Scraps in the Long Eighteenth Century.

November 2024 |The New York Eighteenth-Century Seminar. Fordham University.

The Revolt of the Papers; or Bits and Pieces toward a Feminist Theory of Scrap.

March 2024 |W. J. Alexander Lecture in English Literature. University College, University of Toronto.

Believing in Novels: Hoax, Hocus, and the Gothic.

November 2023 |For the Novel Network, University of Sydney, Australia. | Revised version given for “Fiction, Belief and Disbelief,” seminar at the American Comparative Literature Association meeting. Montréal, March 2024.

'The diamond quit—with me the pencil take': Albums and the Enduring Ephemeral.

September 2023 |Plenary lecture for “Between Text and Image: Print Media and Visual Culture in the Long 19th Century.” Manchester Metropolitan University.

Walter Scott’s Typographical Antiquities.

April 2023 |SWINC (Scottish Writing in the Nineteenth Century) lecture, University of Edinburgh.

The Social Life of Scraps: Scavenging, Shearing, Sharing, and Gleaning.

April 2023 |Plenary address for “Reading and Book Circulation, 1650-1850.” The Books and Borrowing Project. University of Stirling (Scotland).

Ali Smith and the Unfinished Book: The Seasons Quartet and Seriality in the Digital Age.

February 2023 |For 'To Be Continued: Narrative Continuation and the Novel.' Freie Universität, Berlin.

Hocus, Hoax, Priestcraft: The Gothic at the Limits of Fiction.

May 2022 |For "The Turn against Fictionality." Center for the Study of the Novel. Stanford University.

Unbinding Walter Scott: Books, Scraps, and Dispersive Reading.

July 2021 (On Zoom) |Plenary lecture for “Walter Scott at 250.” 12th International Scott Conference.

Bugs in Books.

October 2021 (On Zoom) |For the Digital Workshop on Manuscript Albums, organized by the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Culture, University of Hamburg, Germany.

Charles Lamb’s Paperwork.

March 2020 |For the Workshop on Material Texts. University of Pennsylvania | Revised and extended version given (on Zoom) for the Paris-London Romanticism Seminar, June 2022; (on Zoom) for the research seminar of the English Department of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, November 2022.

Stranded in the Present in Persuasion.

September 2019 |For the Jane Austen Society of North America Massachusetts Chapter.

Paper Mosaics and Paper Sentiments: Mary Delany’s Loves of the Plants.

January 2018 |Plenary address for the annual meeting of the Australian-New Zealand Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Brisbane, Australia, December 2017. | Also given for the Columbia University Seminar in 18th-Century Studies, January 2018.