
book history, the novel, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture, gender
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.
Murray Hall, Room 012, College Ave Campus
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
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Further Reading
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- Oxford University Press, 2020
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What We Talk About When We Talk About Books
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- Basic Books, 2019
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How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain
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- Princeton University Press, 2012
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Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books
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- Yale University Press, 2011
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Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture
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- Ashgate Press, 2005
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The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel
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- Cambridge University Press, 2000
Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Yale (1998);
A.B. in Literature summa cum laude, Harvard (1991).