My primary area of interest is nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies in Britain.  My first book, English Origins, Jewish Discourse, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (2009), examines responses to Jewish and Christian religious and historical affiliations. In published articles and edited essay collections I've focused explicitly on the intersection of nineteenth-century nation formation, religion, race, and imperial culture.   

My current research projects turn toward archival theory, nineteenth-century book history, digital humanities, and writing about London.  My book project examines writing produced by nineteenth-century residents of London’s East End.  I examine both constructions of place created by those who lived and worked in the East End and in the archive’s role in mediating those constructions. Simultaneously, I'm building a related digital archive of unpublished archival materials from the nineteenth-century East End to connect and visualize local and global cultural networks. My work on Victorian London has led to a related interest in Jamaican literary and material culture which had strong ties with major ports in the Atlantic world, including London. Through this work I've collaborated on a multi-year research project to create a permanent archive of Jamaican Jewish cemeteries.

I teach classes in the following areas: the nineteenth-century British novel, nineteenth-century book and material culture studies, Jewish writers, British imperial fictions, women’s literary history, Archival studies/theory, digital humanities, and graphic fictions.