UMass Boston

Early American literature; multilingual U.S. writing; environmental humanities

B.A., Ph.D., University of California Berkeley

M.A., University of California Irvine

• Co-editor, Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown, vol. 2: The Monthly Magazine and Other Writings, 1789–1802. Bucknell University Press, 2026.
• Co-author, "Monima: A Novel of the Immigrant Experience in the Multilingual Early Republic."
• Co-author, “Spectacle Islands: Indigeneity, Performance, and the Archipelago in Hope Leslie.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 13.1 (2025): 97-129.
• “AI, Ai, and I: Mapping Marxist and Afrofuturist Approaches to Plagiarism and ChatGPT with Pauline Hopkins.” Radical Teacher 132 (2025): 4-12.
• Co-author, "Early American Magazine Writing in and out of the Charles Brockden Brown Canon," Early American Literature 57.2 (2022): 555–62.
• Intro. & co-ed., "Early American Women Authors Unbound," special issue of Women's Studies, 2021.
• "The Critical Force of Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Revolution" (review essay), Early American Literature 56.1 (2021): 259–272.
• “Slavery, Abolition, and African Americans in Brown.” In The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown. Oxford University Press, 2019. 302–17.
• “Circulating the American Revolution: The Atlantic Networks of Christian Jacob Hütter.” In Beyond 1776: Globalizing the Literatures, Cultures and Communities of the American Revolution. University of Virginia Press, 2018. 25–47.
• "An Unoriginal Modernity: The Novelist-Translator Friedrich von Oertel (1764–1807)." Edinburgh German Yearbook 18 (2018): 107–24.
• "Postcards from Waterloo: Tom Verlaine’s Historical Constellations." In Rock and Romanticism. Palgrave, 2018. 121-144.
• "Cultural Transfer in the German Atlantic: Brown, Oertel, and the First Translation of a U.S. Novel." In Transatlantic Literature and Transitivity, 1780-1850: Subjects, Texts, and Print Culture. Routledge, 2017. 171-194.
• Ed., Cities and the Circulation of Culture in the Atlantic World: From the Early Modern to Modernism. Palgrave, 2017.
• "The Silkworm and the Bee: Georgia, Cognitive Mapping, and the Atlantic Labour System in Boltzius and Thomson." In The Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic Literary Studies. Edinburgh University Press, 2016. 17–30.
• “Christian Jacob Hütter’s Washington: An Introduction, Commentary, and Translation of the Work.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 60.2/3 (2015): 293–331.
• Intro. & co-ed., Urban Identity and the Atlantic World. Palgrave, 2013.
• "'Self-Created Societies': Sociability and Statehood in the Pittsburgh Enlightenment." Sociability and Cosmopolitanism: Social Bonds on the Fringes of the Enlightenment. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012. 121–140.
• "A Massachusetts Yankee in Karl Theodor's Court: Count Rumford's Sovereign Benevolence and Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond." Symbiosis 15.1 (2011): 45-61.
• "Pitching Transatlanticism: Commerce, Race, and the Academic Marketplace." In Teaching the Transatlantic Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010. 1-19.
• "Romantic Federalism: Atlantic Republican Literature Between Cosmopolitanism and Confederation." Literature Compass 6.6 (2009): 1127–44.
• "Republican Centaurs." Early American Studies 4.1 (2006): 192–232.
• Shorter work includes pieces for textbooks and encyclopedias, an essay on film pedagogy, and book reviews on Atlantic and early American topics in The Wordsworth Circle, Eighteenth-Century Studies, The New England Quarterly, The Journal of American Studies, The Journal of the Early Republic, American Literary History Online, and The Middle Ground Journal.

A native of Northern California, I was slow to learn about New England's environmental history, but have recently been fascinated by the field. As a participant in a project funded by an NEH Connections grant, I co-taught courses in the School for the Environment on Writing and the Environment and the capstone on Developing Boston Harbor Across Time Scales. I also taught a course on "Doing Environmental History in Early America" at the American Antiquarian Society for undergraduates studying in the Worcester area.

Other recent undergraduate courses have included the year-long Experiencing Boston course for first-year students, as well as two "gateway" courses for the English major, Introduction to Literary Studies and Six American Authors. In 2026 I debuted a course on Multilingual Societies for the Honors College. Other advanced undergraduate courses include Early African-American Literature, Literature and the Political Imagination, Colonial American Literature, and Literature of the Atlantic. Some years ago, I taught a seminar in the Boston Public Library's Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts which culminated in an exhibit, "Sermons, Slavery, and Scandal: The Printed Worlds of Early Boston, 1660-1830."

I served as Chair of UMB's English Department from 2017 to 2021 before spending a year as a Barra Sabbatical Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. As the current Dean of the Honors College, I see interdisciplinary inquiry and undergraduate research as the defining aims of an Honors experience, and am building academic and professional pathways for ambitious students from all majors.