My books include What We Talk About When We Talk About Books (Basic Books, 2019, Ukrainian translation 2020, PBK Christian Gauss Award); How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton UP, 2012; Patten Prize, Channing Prize, honorable mention for James Russell Lowell Prize) and The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (Cambridge UP, 2000). I also edited Further Reading (with Matthew Rubery, Oxford UP 2020), Unpacking my Library: Writers and their Books (Yale UP, 2011); Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture (with Pamela Thurschwell); and (with Seth Lerer) a cluster of essays of PMLA on The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature.

I write for the New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, New York Review of Books, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe and Public Books (where I am also a section editor: pitch me). My research on the history of reading has been profiled in The New Yorker, The Economist, New York Times Book Review and the New York Times, and I contributed the nineteenth-century module to Harvard’s online course on the history of the book.

Pulitzer Prize jury; Guggenheim Fellowship; NEH Public Scholar Fellowship.

Recipient of the 2020 Christian Gauss Award for What We Talk About When We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading

Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Yale (1998);

A.B. in Literature summa cum laude, Harvard (1991).