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 writing, publishing, and bookselling and their politics. I’m especially interested in how people negotiated changing 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 (people accused of “quackery”) — 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 research project, Manufacturing Literature. Supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and TMU’s Faculty of Arts, this project studies how people made books by compiling or editing parts of other publications without attribution during the nineteenth century, how these practices and the ways they were understood changed over time, and their effects on literature and information. I’m drawing on several approaches to do this work, including computational 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’ve been working on a couple of smaller projects focused on collecting and publishing research data on advertising practices and on the enforcement of obscenity laws. One of the reasons I created this site was have a way of sharing some aspects of these projects that may not be published formally.