Publications

Books

Time and Antiquity in American Empire: Roma Redux. Oxford University Press, 2021.

Rural Fictions, Urban Realities: A Geography of Gilded Age American Literature. Oxford University Press, 2013.

Co-editor: The Cambridge Companion to American Horror, Cambridge University Press, 2022

Essays

‘The Edge of the Fringe: (Not) Reading Kathe Koja’s The Cipher’. Forthcoming in American Gothic Studies, June 2025.

'1973 and the American Horror Film: Political Futurity in The Exorcist and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre';. Horror Studies. 15.1 (2024).

With Stephen Shapiro, ‘American Horror: Genre and History’. Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to American Horror. Cambridge Univereity Press, 2022.

‘Antiquity/Modernity: An Issue of Puck Magazine, 1889'. Crossings in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. Ed. Edward Sugden (EUP, 2022).

'Roma Redux: The Analogical Nineteenth Century'. Neither the Time Nor the Place: The New Nineteenth-Century American Studies. Ed. Christopher Castiglia and Susan Gillman (Penn Press, 2022).

'Local Color, World-System; or, American Realism at the Periphery'.The Oxford Handbook of American Realism. Ed. Keith Newlin (OUP, 2019).

'Sarah Orne Jewett's Foreign Correspondence'. The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing, ed. Celeste-Marie Bernier, Matthew Pethers, and Judie Newman (EUP, 2016): 682-95.

'Ben-Hur and the Spectacle of Empire'. Studies in American Fiction, 42.1 (Spring 2015).

'Spectacular Distractions: P.T. Barnum and American Modernism.' Modernism/modernity, 21.1 (2014): 107-123.

‘Huck and Hank go to the Circus: Mark Twain Under Barnum’s Big Top.’ European Journal of American Culture, 29.3 (2011): 217-228.

‘A Geography of Medical Knowledge: Country Doctors in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Sarah Orne Jewett.’ Journal of American Studies, 44.4 (November 2010): 691-708.

‘Country Matters: Rural Fiction, Urban Modernity, and the Problem of American Regionalism.’ Nineteenth-Century Literature, 65.2 (September 2010): 192-213.

‘“And as things fell apart”: The Crisis of Postmodern Masculinity in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and Dennis Cooper’s Frisk.’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 47.1 (Fall 2005): 57-72.

Selected other writing

'Fiction for geeks and freaks'. Times Literary Supplement (1 Nov 2024).

'Professor Amy Kaplan: A Tribute'. Roundtable contributor, Journal of American Studies. 55.3 (July 2021).

'More Than Just One Liners.' Review of Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal by Jay Parini. Los Angeles Review of Books (Oct 2015).

'Why Go Set a Watchman is the novel we deserve'. The Conversation, 15 July 2015.

Convenor and contributor, Roundtable Forum on Fredric Jameson’s The Antinomies of Realism (Verso, 2013). With Bridget Bennett, Rachel Bowlby, Andrew Lawson, Graham Thompson, and Fredric Jameson. (Journal of American Studies, Nov 2014).