I am a professor of English at SUNY-Buffalo, where I research the eighteenth-century Anglophone world, cultural history, and infrastructure. My academic writing has appeared in Critical Inquiry, ELH, PMLA, Eighteenth-Century Studies, The Eighteenth Century, Philological Quarterly, and various critical collections. I have also written essays for The Washington Post, The Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Time, Avidly, and Book Post.

My last book, The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region came out from the University of Chicago Press in 2024 (paperback 2026).  It’s about trains, and how they make the places that make us.  My first book, The Wreckage of Intentions: Projects in British Culture, 1660-1730 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) investigated the origins of projects, concrete yet incomplete efforts to advance British society in a period defined by revolutions of finance and agriculture, the rise of experimental science, and the establishment of constitutional monarchy.

I am finishing a monograph, Rights of Way: A Literary Approach to Infrastructure (under contract with the University of Chicago Press) which finds the conceptual origins of our built world in early modern debates over the legality of passage. I have delivered invited talks from this project at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Wake Forest, the University of Toronto, and the University of Iowa.

With Danielle Spratt, I co-edited the critical collection, Histories of Science: Natural Philosophy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (University of Virginia Press, 2025). With Jo Guldi, I edited a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies on infrastructure.