"Students often come into a course on early American literature expecting to learn something about the origin of the United States. And as people who were born here, or moved here, or live here for the moment, they expect to learn something about themselves too. I try to impress upon them that, for most of the colonial period, people in the Americas had no idea that something called the ‘United States’ would ever exist, or that they were ‘progressing’ toward it. They inhabited a different world that needs to be understood on its own terms. When the class goes well, they do learn something about origins, but not in the way they expected."

• Seminar: Writing Revolution
• Atlantic Cultures
• Colonial American Literature
• Literary Theory

• American Council of Learned Societies, Fellowship (full year), 2008-2009
• Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 2004-2006
• Alumni and Faculty Prize for the Most Distinguished Dissertation of the Year, Ph.D. Program in English (Graduate Center, CUNY), 2004

• Member, American Studies Association
• Member, Society of Early Americanists
• Member, Modern Language Association

• "'The Itinerant Man': Crèvecoeur's Caribbean, Raynal's Revolution, and the Fate of Atlantic Cosmopolitanism" 
  The William and Mary Quarterly 61.2, April 2004
• "The Vertigo of Circum-Caribbean Empire: William Bartram's Florida" 
  Mississippi Quarterly 57.1, Winter 2003/2004