I research and write about convergences of gender, sexuality, and feminism in British literary history, with a particular specialization in the history of pornography. Since I was a teenager reading romance novels, I’ve been fascinated by what sex does in literature—how it evokes pleasure, curiosity, power, and violence. My book What Pornography Knows traces currents of feminism and social justice in British pornography from the 1740s to the present. My first book, Excitable Imaginations, examined the convergence of sex with morality, aesthetics, and reading in eighteenth-century literature and philosophy. My edited volume Nineteenth-Century British Pornography: Sources and Materials offers a collection of primary sources for the study of pornographic print culture. At St. John’s University, where I am a Professor, I teach genre-centered courses on the novel and pornography as well as courses on literary histories of gender, slavery, feminism, and criminality.

My writing and research seeks radical theories of gender and feminism in counterintuitive places—pornography, eighteenth-century marginalia, moral fiction, marriage plots, free indirect discourse. In addition to my books, my writing appears in public-facing venues and scholarly journals, such as my recent collaboration on a trans-studies roundtable in Studies in English Literature. I have served as Reviews Editor for the journal Eighteenth-Century Studies and as Chair of an MLA forum on eighteenth-century British literature; and at St. John’s I cultivate community among writers as Director of the University Writing Center.