I teach the novel, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British culture, gender, and book history.

My books include How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton UP, 2012; Patten Prize, Channing Prize, honorable mention for James Russell Lowell Prize) The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (Cambridge UP, 2000), and What We Talk About When We Talk About Books.  I also edited 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, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe and Public Books (where I am also a section editor). On the page as in the classroom, I search for ways to make potentially arcane topics accessible, and my research has been profiled in The New Yorker, The Economist, and the New York Times. In 2015, 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.

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

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