I’m an Associate Professor of English at the University of Waterloo, where I teach courses in literary studies, media history, and academic and creative writing.

My primary research area is British Romanticism, with a focus on conversations between literature and science. I’ve been especially interested in poetry, popular song, and the ballad revival. My first book, Romanticism’s Other Minds (2020), examines how collecting popular ballads and imitating ancient poems and songs became a way for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers to engage with new ideas emerging from the sciences of the mind. While Romantic writers often saw poetry and song as a window into the mind’s inner structures, or its ostensibly universal foundations, they also made linguistic artifacts the occasion to stage a more surprising set of debates about natural sociability, cultural scaffolding, and the socially distributed mind.

In my current book project I am looking at how those debates play out in the context of gothic literature, beginning with collectors and imitators of the gothic ballad. Other works in progress include a project about field recording as gothic media practice; and a series of essays about Romanticism’s soundscapes (ecological, industrial, and musical).

I also have personal interests in sound design and field recording, and have made sounds for projects including Cities and Memory and Gothic Listening.