Associate Professor of English
Ph.D. 1996 (History of American Civilization), A.M. 1992 (history), Harvard; B.A. summa cum laude 1987 (literature and history), Yale

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Research Interests:

American literature and culture; material and cultural history of literacy; literary practices of everyday life; ethics and civic life in American liberalism.

Affiliations:

Editorial board, American Studies

Fellowships/Honors:

National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship; Finalist, Prize for a First Book of the Modern Language Association; Honorable Mention, Ralph Gabriel Dissertation Prize of the American Studies Association; Helen Choate Bell Dissertation Prize in American Literature, Harvard University; Charlotte Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship; Jacob K. Javits Fellowship.

Selected Works:

The Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2003.

Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States (co-editor). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007.

Libraries as Agencies of Culture (co-editor).  Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002.

“Temperance, Mass Culture, and the Romance of Experience,” American Literary History 19:2 (Spring, 2007).

“Faith in Reading: Public Libraries, Liberalism, and Civil Religion,” Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States. 

“Finding Barnum on the Internet,” Common-place 5:6 (October, 2005).

"The Commerce of Thought: Professional Authority and Business Ethics in Nineteenth-Century America," Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 27 (2002).

“The Costs of Character,” ISSUE 6 (Fall, 2001).

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