Books
The Rise of Celebrity Authorship: Nineteenth-Century Print Culture and Antislavery (forthcoming Columbia UP, Fall 2025)
Literary celebrity in the nineteenth century emerged from a miscellaneous array of trending print forms, including antislavery writing, which was a popular, consumable form of literature in the period. Antislavery print culture could function as a pop culture, leveraging cultural myths about gender and authorship through print forms that connected readers with writers: printed collections of author signatures, descriptions of writers' homes, autobiography, biography, and travel writing. The Rise of Celebrity Authorship traces surprising relations among figures and across shared forms in the period: What do antislavery forms and figures tell us about literary celebrity and the networks of transatlantic print culture?
The Rise of Celebrity Authorship illuminates the collective creation of celebrity by tracing unexpected connections within this anarchic nineteenth-century literary marketplace, shifting focus from the conventional literary work of major writers to the breadth of print forms circulating around them. It considers a variety of texts adjacent to the novel, including Edgar Allan Poe’s satire of autograph collecting, antislavery gift books, and a Southern travelogue by the Swedish writer Frederika Bremer. It also draws striking parallels between two starkly different 1858 texts: Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë, which sought to unearth the reality behind Jane Eyre, and Josiah Henson’s autobiography, which circulated as the life of the “original Uncle Tom.” A rich account of the competing and complementary forces that shape images of authors, this book reveals the collaborative work of literary production and celebrity.
Reductive Reading: A Syntax of Moralizing in Victorian Fiction (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018), Honorable Mention for 2018 Best Book of the Year by the North American Victorian Studies Association (here). Reviewed in Review of English Studies by Natalie Houston (here), in Nineteenth-Century Literature by Matthew Sussman (here), in Victorian Periodical Studies by Julia Sorge Way (here), in Victorians Institute Journal by Megan Ward (here), and in Victorian Studies by Danny Wright (here). It was also featured on the V21 Collective Book Forum (here) and discussed by Nan Z. Da in her "Critical Response III" essay in Critical Inquiry (here). It was mentioned in a New Yorker "Talk of the Town" essay by Antonia Hitchens (here).
Reductive Reading takes up critical methods that call attention to how they subordinate, or reduce, textual complexity. The book uses a reductive lens to argue that the moral force of Victorian fiction lies not only in the examples of conduct offered by its characters or the wise words delivered by its narrators, but in the structures of judgment encoded in its syntax. The first chapter reads censorious mid-nineteenth-century book reviews, which paid careful attention to form because textual detail in the period was understood to be saturated with moral as well as aesthetic significance. Three case studies follow: In the George Eliot's essays and novels, clauses that modify major nouns create space for critical reflection; in the sketches and novels of Charles Dickens, speech-tags that describe a character’s manner of speaking invest even the shortest speech with dramatic irony; in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s novel-epic, present-tense digressions disrupt the developmental narrative of the plot to exercise provisional judgment in the middle of unfolding events.
Edited Special Issue
Co-Editor with Megan Ward, special issue of Studies in the Novel, “Nobody Cares but Everybody Should: Towards a New History of the Novel.” Volume 56, Number 4: 2024.
Refereed Articles and Book Chapters
* “Larsson, Remade: A Computational Perspective on the Millennium Trilogy in English.” Karl Berglund and Sarah Allison. PMLA 139.1 (January 2024): 82-96.
* “Why Always Dorothea? The Rhetorical Question in Canon & Archive,” in On Style in Victorian Fiction, edited by Daniel Tyler, Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. 58 - 74.
* “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Harriet Martineau: On the Limits of White Ladyism,” in “Miscellany as Method: A Trio of Approaches to ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’ and the 1848 Liberty Bell Gift Book.” With Lucy Sheehan and Jennifer Sorensen. Victorian Poetry 59.3 (2021): 261-308.
* “Literature.” Victorian Literature and Culture, Keywords, 46, no. 3/4 (2018): 745–49. My contribution to the Special Issue on Keywords.
* “Canon/Archive. Largescale Dynamics in the Literary Field”; “Style at the Scale of the Sentence”; and "Quantitative Formalism: An Experiment," collaboratively-written Stanford Litlab pamphlets subsequently collected in Canon/Archive (n+1 books, 2017).
* “Narrative Form and Facts, Facts, Facts: Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë,” Genre 50.1 (2017). On reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë against Jane Eyre : An Autobiography (1848), in special issue on “Narrative Against Data” edited by Adam Grener and Jesse Rosenthal .
* "Other People's Data: Humanities Edition," Journal of Cultural Analytics (Dec 2016). This essay argues that that we need to make better use of the excess data produced by projects that use numbers to make sense of literature.
* “George Eliot’s Discerning Syntax,” in ELH 81.4 (2014).
Selected Public Writing
* "Jane Austen Was Not Fucking Around about Home School." Avidly, Sept 10, 2020. On reading Mansfield Park in 2020.
* "Death Poetry During a Pandemic" The Rambling, Oct 25, 2020. On the intersection of teaching and grief, and also Tennyson,
* "Authorship After AI." Digital Humanities Section. Public Books, June 26, 2019. On authorship attribution and its limits.
* “Harry Potter’s Scar, or Book Recs from a Columbine Grad.” Public Books, April 20, 2018. Review of The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma Bessel van der Kolk and a few Harry Potter books.
* “Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter” (Spring 2014) and “Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen” (Winter 2013), New Orleans Review. Experiments in the form of the nineteenth-century review: long excerpts connected by impressionistic ligaments.
Works in Progress:
Escape Reading: Wherever You Go, There You Are reflects my experience as a survivor of the 1999 Columbine shooting as well as my expertise in books as a lifelong binge-reader with a PhD in English from Stanford University. This book argues that escape reading is not only the hot cousin of avoidance, but an oblique way to encounter otherwise intolerable feelings and memories.
The Rise of Celebrity Authorship: Nineteenth-Century Print Culture and Antislavery (forthcoming Columbia UP, Fall 2025)
Literary celebrity in the nineteenth century emerged from a miscellaneous array of trending print forms, including antislavery writing, which was a popular, consumable form of literature in the period. Antislavery print culture could function as a pop culture, leveraging cultural myths about gender and authorship through print forms that connected readers with writers: printed collections of author signatures, descriptions of writers' homes, autobiography, biography, and travel writing. The Rise of Celebrity Authorship traces surprising relations among figures and across shared forms in the period: What do antislavery forms and figures tell us about literary celebrity and the networks of transatlantic print culture?
The Rise of Celebrity Authorship illuminates the collective creation of celebrity by tracing unexpected connections within this anarchic nineteenth-century literary marketplace, shifting focus from the conventional literary work of major writers to the breadth of print forms circulating around them. It considers a variety of texts adjacent to the novel, including Edgar Allan Poe’s satire of autograph collecting, antislavery gift books, and a Southern travelogue by the Swedish writer Frederika Bremer. It also draws striking parallels between two starkly different 1858 texts: Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë, which sought to unearth the reality behind Jane Eyre, and Josiah Henson’s autobiography, which circulated as the life of the “original Uncle Tom.” A rich account of the competing and complementary forces that shape images of authors, this book reveals the collaborative work of literary production and celebrity.
Reductive Reading: A Syntax of Moralizing in Victorian Fiction (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018), Honorable Mention for 2018 Best Book of the Year by the North American Victorian Studies Association (here). Reviewed in Review of English Studies by Natalie Houston (here), in Nineteenth-Century Literature by Matthew Sussman (here), in Victorian Periodical Studies by Julia Sorge Way (here), in Victorians Institute Journal by Megan Ward (here), and in Victorian Studies by Danny Wright (here). It was also featured on the V21 Collective Book Forum (here) and discussed by Nan Z. Da in her "Critical Response III" essay in Critical Inquiry (here). It was mentioned in a New Yorker "Talk of the Town" essay by Antonia Hitchens (here).
Reductive Reading takes up critical methods that call attention to how they subordinate, or reduce, textual complexity. The book uses a reductive lens to argue that the moral force of Victorian fiction lies not only in the examples of conduct offered by its characters or the wise words delivered by its narrators, but in the structures of judgment encoded in its syntax. The first chapter reads censorious mid-nineteenth-century book reviews, which paid careful attention to form because textual detail in the period was understood to be saturated with moral as well as aesthetic significance. Three case studies follow: In the George Eliot's essays and novels, clauses that modify major nouns create space for critical reflection; in the sketches and novels of Charles Dickens, speech-tags that describe a character’s manner of speaking invest even the shortest speech with dramatic irony; in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s novel-epic, present-tense digressions disrupt the developmental narrative of the plot to exercise provisional judgment in the middle of unfolding events.
Edited Special Issue
Co-Editor with Megan Ward, special issue of Studies in the Novel, “Nobody Cares but Everybody Should: Towards a New History of the Novel.” Volume 56, Number 4: 2024.
Refereed Articles and Book Chapters
* “Larsson, Remade: A Computational Perspective on the Millennium Trilogy in English.” Karl Berglund and Sarah Allison. PMLA 139.1 (January 2024): 82-96.
* “Why Always Dorothea? The Rhetorical Question in Canon & Archive,” in On Style in Victorian Fiction, edited by Daniel Tyler, Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. 58 - 74.
* “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Harriet Martineau: On the Limits of White Ladyism,” in “Miscellany as Method: A Trio of Approaches to ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’ and the 1848 Liberty Bell Gift Book.” With Lucy Sheehan and Jennifer Sorensen. Victorian Poetry 59.3 (2021): 261-308.
* “Literature.” Victorian Literature and Culture, Keywords, 46, no. 3/4 (2018): 745–49. My contribution to the Special Issue on Keywords.
* “Canon/Archive. Largescale Dynamics in the Literary Field”; “Style at the Scale of the Sentence”; and "Quantitative Formalism: An Experiment," collaboratively-written Stanford Litlab pamphlets subsequently collected in Canon/Archive (n+1 books, 2017).
* “Narrative Form and Facts, Facts, Facts: Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë,” Genre 50.1 (2017). On reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë against Jane Eyre : An Autobiography (1848), in special issue on “Narrative Against Data” edited by Adam Grener and Jesse Rosenthal .
* "Other People's Data: Humanities Edition," Journal of Cultural Analytics (Dec 2016). This essay argues that that we need to make better use of the excess data produced by projects that use numbers to make sense of literature.
* “George Eliot’s Discerning Syntax,” in ELH 81.4 (2014).
Selected Public Writing
* "Jane Austen Was Not Fucking Around about Home School." Avidly, Sept 10, 2020. On reading Mansfield Park in 2020.
* "Death Poetry During a Pandemic" The Rambling, Oct 25, 2020. On the intersection of teaching and grief, and also Tennyson,
* "Authorship After AI." Digital Humanities Section. Public Books, June 26, 2019. On authorship attribution and its limits.
* “Harry Potter’s Scar, or Book Recs from a Columbine Grad.” Public Books, April 20, 2018. Review of The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma Bessel van der Kolk and a few Harry Potter books.
* “Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter” (Spring 2014) and “Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen” (Winter 2013), New Orleans Review. Experiments in the form of the nineteenth-century review: long excerpts connected by impressionistic ligaments.
Works in Progress:
Escape Reading: Wherever You Go, There You Are reflects my experience as a survivor of the 1999 Columbine shooting as well as my expertise in books as a lifelong binge-reader with a PhD in English from Stanford University. This book argues that escape reading is not only the hot cousin of avoidance, but an oblique way to encounter otherwise intolerable feelings and memories.
