I work on the literature and culture of the long nineteenth century, particularly the Victorian novel and its relationship to cultural and social life. More specifically, I'm interested in the work of narrative form, especially the relationship between serial form and the history of the novel, and the relationship between novel form and emerging theories of human identity. I am the co-director (with Adam Grener) of Dickens Notes, which explores Charles Dickens's working notes to demonstrate the serial unfolding of his novels and the dynamic networks of interaction between characters and readers--and between notes and novel--they facilitate. You can read more about my current projects below.
I am the co-director of Dickens Notes, an open-access digital scholarly edition of the detailed working notes Charles Dickens kept for his novels in the second half of his career. These texts constitute a unique archive essential to understanding this major author's navigation of serial writing in monthly or weekly installments. In addition to offering valuable insights into individual novels, these documents shed light on the development of serial narrative form in the 19th century. Our interactive edition presents visually-faithful transcriptions of Dickens's manuscripts and comprehensive annotations to capture Dickens's dynamic use of these pages before, during, and after writing his installments.
Dickens Notes is supported by a 2026-27 NEH Scholarly Editions grant to fund the completion of the project, including the publication of the remaining five editions of notes and the integration of manuscript photographs.
Dickens Notes, 2023. Editorial & critical material word count: 65,725.
"The Mystery of Edwin Drood Working Notes"
Dickens Notes, forthcoming December 2026
Articles & Chapters
Peer Reviewed Journal Articles
Click an entry to expand its abstract and link to the article.
The question "What is Victorian Literature?" opened the description for a graduate course I taught in spring 2025, an invitation to limn the scope of our field. From the beginning of the semester, my students wisely resisted the definitional impulse that it presupposed—the notion that our goal was to identify a coherent object of study, albeit one that would expand beyond our expected list of "major" authors to include authors of color and writers living within and moving through the expansive colonial geography of Britain. As our semester began to unfold amid the dismantling of diversity programs and anti-racist initiatives that had been lauded so enthusiastically only a few semesters earlier, our class took up this question as an invitation to define our orientation towards our objects of study, our field, and the work of the humanities more broadly. In this essay, I reflect on the lessons I learned from teaching this class in this moment, from my own inadequate and provisional, but productive, attempt to design a course that answered the call by Alicia Mireless Christoff, Amy R. Wong, and Ronjaunee Chatterjee to "undiscipline" our field. In the wake of that call, and in the classroom where that call is tested, the task is not (only) to expand boundaries but to interrogate, with our students, the methodological and representational components of Victorian studies as a classroom practice. Link
Annotation is such an everyday readerly activity that it is easy to dismiss as too mundane and minute to have serious value as scholarship. And yet social annotation has seen a resurgence as a pedagogical strategy thanks to new digital tools, and Victorian Studies scholars were encouraged to engage in annotative engagement with one another's papers in COVE Studio during EVENT 2024. While the uneven uptake and mixed success of annotation over the course of the conference year might suggest that the margins are not yet the vibrant virtual spaces of possibility they seem to be in our teaching, this essay asserts the value of the margins as pleasurable spaces of vital critical practice. I explore the affordances of annotation for facilitating fluid, even emancipatory methods of critical engagement that can bridge the pedagogical and scholarly realms of our academic work. Tracing recent attempts to theorise annotation in the digital era alongside trends in open scholarship, and addressing the structural impediments to collaborative and flexible forms of writing, I argue that our field should embrace annotation as a valuable form of scholarly practice and scholarly product. Link
The Digital Dickens Notes Project (DDNP) is a digital initiative that seeks to transcribe, interpret, and explore the significance of the working notes Charles Dickens kept for most of his novels. Our online platform (dickensnotes.org) presents color transcriptions that display Dickens's use of space, ink colors, and nontextual markings to capture his intricate use of these pages over the course of the many weeks or months he planned, composed, and published his novels serially. Pairing these transcriptions with comprehensive editorial annotations and critical introductions, the DDNP aims to shed new light on the temporal dynamics of these working notes as fascinating records of serial composition, and in the process to open new avenues and methodologies for analyzing Dickens's works. This co-authored article introduces the DDNP and its methodology. Link
This essay reads Charlotte Brontë's use of first-person narration in Villette as a contribution to a Victorian reassessment of personal identity as material, heterogeneous, and adaptive. Challenging common readings of Brontë's first-person fictions as displays of self-definition and authority, I unpack the relationship between the narrated and narrating person in both Jane Eyre and Villette to reveal dual operations of narrative—world-making strategies and adaptive tactics—that express competing notions of personhood. By comparing Villette (1853) to Jane Eyre (1847), we can chart a shift from a strategic to a tactical emphasis in narration indicative, I argue, of a broader movement in nineteenth-century thought from Cartesian dualism toward associationist and materialist theories of consciousness as adaptive and processual. Villette's narrative tactics demonstrate the potential in novel form to enact processes of being in the world that challenge both traditional concepts of a unified, self-contained consciousness and new Victorian scientific conceptions of a material mind only knowable from science's "objective" perspective. Positioning Brontë's novel form alongside psychological debates about the nature and study of mind, I show how the novel offers alternative methodologies and conclusions about the nature of personhood to those proffered by an emerging Victorian psychology. When Brontë's first-person narrative produces (rather than assumes the prior presence of) a "person" narrating, it asks us to read that production of identity and consciousness as an experiment with what it means to experience oneself as, in the words of Jane Eyre, a "heterogeneous thing." Link
This essay demonstrates how Charles Dickens used the form of serial fiction to experiment with a uniquely Victorian idea of life as a dynamic network of interactions. Reading Our Mutual Friend alongside nineteenth-century physiological and evolutionary writing, I show how Dickens shaped novel form around the attractions and reactions that organized social and psychological life in his city. Victorian sciences—particularly the work of George Henry Lewes and Charles Darwin—were turning to "net-work" to describe the plastic processes underpinning biological life. Dickens's fiction used the same dynamic potential of network form to put in motion the mechanisms of social life. Taking a novel form traditionally organized around the story of a self, Dickens used serial publication to incorporate variety, change, and new combinations of radically heterogeneous characters into each new installment, turning novel form into an ongoing formation. The resulting model of character psychology is one that replaces interiority with interaction and individuated desire with physiological affect. Link
Forthcoming Articles and Chapters
This contribution to the Routledge Companion to Sensation Fiction (projected publication 2026) offers a pedagogical approach to using "sensation" as both an object of study and as an opportunity to interrogate our orientation, as 21st-century readers, towards Victorian cultural objects. Drawing on courses taught at two institutions, I present a series of three scaffolded "explorations" that contextualize sensation fiction and engage students in discussions about the work of interpretation. These lessons culminate in a digital curation project for which each student selects, presents, and analyzes their own Victorian "sensational object." This method helps students engage with broad cultural ideas of the sensational, while using sensation as a means of reflecting on our practices of reading, analysis, and critique.
This contribution to the edited collection Digital Dickens (White Rose Press, projected publication 2026) explores the work of digital annotation that underpins the Dickens Notes project. Co-authored with Adam Grener, this essay considers how an interactive, exploratory edition of these working notes can foster a user-experience that imitates how the author himself used these pages. We explain the affordances of a digital platform for cultivating scholars' understanding and readers' appreciation of the dynamic temporality of Dickens's serial composition. Focusing on the working notes for Hard Times and Little Dorrit, the chapter discusses the opportunities and challenges of using digital annotation to make the complexity of these static documents visible. While for Dickens the working notes served as a compressed record of an ongoing compositional process, the Dickens Notes annotations use these records to access that process and to offer new points of entry into and exploration of Dickens's serial novels.
This contribution to the MLA Approaches to Teaching Great Expectations volume considers how to engage students with the serial form of Dickens's weekly novel. It offers practical methods for encountering the material facets of the novel's seriality from the outset of teaching the novel. By training students' attention on the breaks between parts and their affective and formal dimensions as they read, and encouraging them to reflect on the relationship between parts and whole at the end, I offer ways of attending to the serial dynamics of a novel they otherwise might imagine as a large single text. The essay makes the case that attention to the serial format and form of the novel helps students resist the priority of the holistic critical vantage point and both interrogate and value their own responses to the novel as they read.
The Novel in Process: Charles Dickens and Serial Form
co-authored with Adam Grener
Charles Dickens was still in the process of conceiving and writing his novels as his first readers were already experiencing them, installment by serial installment. And yet scholars and readers today tend to regard Dickens as an author of completed books. By returning us to the active scenes of Dickens's composition, The Novel in Process challenges the whole text as the privileged object of literary analysis. This book demonstrates instead how the novel's form depends on the dynamics of its writing processes—captured in manuscripts, notes, memoranda, letters, proofs—which reveal the importance of openness and contingency to how novels are composed and read. As we show with new research into Dickens's manuscript archives, these novels were uniquely shaped by the constraints and rhythms of serial publication. This book reimagines Dickens's novels through the forces that gave them shape—from the integration of characters and storylines through the distended process of serial publication, to the spatial parameters of the manuscript page, the typeset column, the printed installment. The Novel in Process offers new perspectives on Dickens's major novels and career, and, in so doing, articulates a process-based theory of the novel itself.
"The Novel in Motion: Material Encounters with Dickens's Serial Composition"
North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) / North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) Joint Conference, November 2026 (forthcoming)
"Mapping the Serial Novel" (Roundtable Presentations)
Portable Pedagogies, Embodied Practices: Teaching Literature in the Age of AI, North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) / North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) Joint Conference, November 2026 (forthcoming)
Public Lecture: "Story Weaving: Charles Dickens's Working Notes"
Victoria & Albert Museum, London, July 2026
"Interacting with Charles Dickens's Writing Process in Mirador"
Digital Humanities Collaborative of North Carolina Institute, May 2026
Presentation & Workshop: "Dickens Notes"
Dickens & the Dynamics of Composition Workshop, National Art Library, London, March 2026
"Novel-writing by scraps against time"
North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) Conference, November 2025
"What is Victorian Literature?: (Re)Forming the Field in a 2025 Classroom"
Victorians Institute Conference, Furman University, SC, September 2025
"Collaborative Annotation" (Poster Presentation)
UNC Learning and Technology Symposium, June 2025
"Student Engagement with Social Annotation" (Lightning Talk)
NC State Moodle Exchange, May 2025
Invited Lecture: "Exploring Serial Form in Process: The Digital Dickens Notes Project"
Dickens Studies Programme Speaker Series, University of Buckingham, UK (virtual), April 2025
Interactive Session Leader: "Facilitating Student Peer Review with Perusall"
NC State Conference on Faculty Excellence, March 2025
Invited Lecture: "Pattern and Process: Victorian Novel Form(ation)"
Appalachian State University Department of English, February 2025
Workshop Co-Leader: "Social Annotation"
DELTA, NC State University, February 2025
"Expanding the Margins: Annotation as Critical Practice"
North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) Conference, EVENT 2024, Atlanta hub, September 2024
Interactive Session Leader: "Discussion in the Margins: Using Annotation Tools to Promote Student Engagement with Texts and Peers in Online and In-Person Courses"
NC State Conference on Faculty Excellence, March 2024
Workshop Leader: "Dialogues in Digital Learning: Creative Uses of Perusall"
DELTA, NC State University, January 2024
"'To be worked out as in life': Forming and Re-forming Little Dorrit" (Panel Organizer)
North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) Conference, Bloomington, IN, November 2023
'An Unnecessary Infliction of Pain on the Reader': Teaching Hard Texts in Hard Times"
Victorians Institute Conference, October 2023
Roundtable Co-organizer and Presenter: "ChatGPT: Adapt, Reject, Embrace? An Interdisciplinary Roundtable"
NC State Conference on Faculty Excellence, March 2023
Roundtable Organizer and Presenter — Roundtable: "Just Assignments: Rethinking Student Work in the Victorian Studies Classroom"; Presentation: "What Students Do with Texts: (Re)Defining Our Goals for the Victorian Literature Classroom"
North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) Conference, Lehigh University, October 2022 — roundtable resources
Roundtable Presenter: "Rethinking the Late British Survey: Anti-Racist Teaching Strategies"
Department of English, NC State University, November 2021
"Illuminating Serial Temporality: The Digital Dickens Notes Project"
Victorians Institute Conference, Charlotte, NC, October 2021
Roundtable Presenter: "Using Annotation Tools to Facilitate Close Reading and Engagement: Discussion in the Margins" — Roundtable: Online Teaching Strategies for Victorianists (and Others): Moving from Crisis to Intentionality
North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) Online Roundtable, August 2020 — recording
"Story-Weaving: The Work of Dickens's Serial Narrative" (Panel Organizer)
North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) Conference, Ohio State University, October 2019
"Reading Dickens Notes"
Victorians Institute Conference, Asheville, NC, November 2018
"Form and Life: The Strategy and Tactics of Victorian Novel Form" (Panel Organizer)
North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) Conference, University of Florida, October 2018
Invited Plenary Speaker: "Dickens Notes and Serial Formation"
Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies (INCS) Conference, March 2018
"Carry Through, Take Up, Hold Over: Choreographing Characters in Dickens's Working Notes"
North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) Conference, Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta, Canada, November 2017
"Uncontainable Bodies: Forming Texts and Selves from Frankenstein to Dracula"
Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference (INCS), Muhlenberg College, PA, March 2017
"Digital Dickens Notes: Form and Formation"
Duquesne University Series on Digital Humanities in the 21st Century, March 2017
Invited Lecture: "Pattern and Process: Charles Dickens's Working Notes and Serial Form"
University of Pittsburgh Department of English, December 2016
"George Eliot's Social Psychology: Objectivity, Subjectivity, and Narrative"
North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) Conference, Arizona State University, November 2016
"'That Incongruous Compound': Francis Galton's Composites and Fin de Siècle Novel Form"
Victorians Institute Conference, NC State University, October 2016
Seminar Organizer and Presenter — "Serial Forms" seminar. Paper: "How We Read Novel Form: Victorian Seriality, Form, and Formation"
American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Harvard University, March 2016
"Forming Towards Form in the Victorian Novel"
Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference (INCS), Appalachian State University, March 2016
"Dickens's Serial Formation"
Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference (INCS), Georgia Institute of Technology, April 2015
"Pattern and Process: Seriality in Dickens's Working Notes and the Digital Dickens Notes Project"
North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) Conference, Western University, Canada, November 2014
"Interactive Pedagogy: Flukes, Failures, and Flexibility"
CHAT Festival Conference, NC State University, February 2014
"Sensation, Science, and (Un)Predictable People" (NAVSA Best Graduate Paper Prize)
North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) Conference, University of Southern California, October 2013