I am a scholar and writer at work on the history of pornography. A professor at St. John’s University and specialist in eighteenth-century literature, my teaching and research spans British literature, the history of sexuality, and gender studies. Since I was a teenager reading romance novels, I’ve been fascinated by what sex does in literature—how it evokes pleasure, curiosity, power, violence. My research into historical pornography has found it has much to tell us about sex and gender in our past and present. My newest book traces currents of feminism and social justice in British pornography from the 1740s to the present. My first book examined the convergence of sex with morality, aesthetics, and reading in eighteenth-century literature and philosophy.

My writing and research seeks radical theories of gender and feminism in counterintuitive places—pornography, eighteenth-century marginalia, moral fiction, marriage plots. In addition to my books, my work appears in scholarly journals and public-facing venues, and I hold appointed roles with the Modern Language Association and the journals Eighteenth-Century Studies and Eighteenth-Century Fiction.