I’m an Associate Professor of English at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto, Canada, where I teach nineteenth-century literature and the history of the book. My research broadly focuses on the publishing industry, including writing, publishing, and bookselling and their politics. I’m especially interested in how people negotiated competition and changing laws and ideas about the proper ways to write and publish, in advertising and marketing practices, and in evolving text technologies.

My first book, Selling Sexual Knowledge: Medical Publishing and Obscenity in Victorian Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2025) examines what making and selling medical works on sexual matters looked like during a period famous both for the proliferation of writing about sex and the expansion of laws aimed at managing the circulation of ‘obscene’ materials. Tracking the intersecting activities of four loosely-defined groups of players — pornographers, radicals, regular medical practitioners and their publishers, and irregular medical practitioners (better known as “quacks”) — the book shows how members of these groups used allegations of obscenity and censorship to market books, define domains of expertise, and consolidate emergent professional and political identities.

My work on Selling Sexual Knowledge led me to my current major research project, Manufacturing Literature. Supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, this project studies how and why people made books by compiling or editing parts of other publications without attribution, how these practices were understood over the course of the nineteenth century, and their effects on literature and information over time. I’m drawing on several approaches to do this work, including digital text analysis and archival research. Hands-on methods I use to teach the history of the book, including letterpress printing, inform some of the research for this project.

In addition to Manufacturing Literature, I’m working on a handful of smaller projects focused on collecting and publishing research data, including datasets focused on advertising practices and the enforcement of obscenity laws in nineteenth-century Britain. One of the reasons I created this site was have a way of sharing some aspects of these projects that may not be published formally.