academic work

After receiving my Bachelor's degree from Princeton University, I immediately went to the University of California, Santa Cruz to pursue my PhD. My original plan was to work on science fiction, and I developed a side project on the science fiction of colonizing Mars. But then I discovered GWM Reynolds--the author who out-sold Charles Dickens and William Thackeray combined and then vanished into obscurity. It was love at first read.

In Reynolds I found an author who showed me Victorian literature and life in a way I'd never seen it before. In Reynolds's work, there is moralizing but also compassion: women had children out of wedlock and didn't die of shame, nor were they thrown out on the street by their fathers. Could you imagine this happening in Dickens? Reynolds is difficult to categorize and his best-known and longest work, _The Mysteries of London_ can be described as a miscellaneous mess. A mess that blew my socks off and seduced me away from science fiction. Reynolds is the heart of my PhD dissertation--but not the whole body.

The journal _Victorian Literature and Culture_ published my article, "Form and Reform: The 'Miscellany Novel'" in 2013. In this article, I identify and advocate for a new genre, the "miscellany novel", a short-lived Victorian genre unique for its form and its reformist agenda.

My PhD dissertation, "Miscellaneous Blood: GWM Reynolds, Dickens, and the Anatomical Moment" is an ambitious look at the body politic in light of the 1832 Anatomy Act, Reynolds's _The Mysteries of London_, and new rhetoric about organs, healthy, and social constructs.

If you are interested in reading my dissertation, please get in touch. I make this project freely available.

I presented at many conferences during my academic career, including at the 2007 Birkbeck Dickens Day on _Edwin Drood_.

I compiled the first bibliography for the GWM Reynolds Society. (It has since been updated.)

In my research at the British Library in London, I discovered a book by Reynolds that was not part of the official biography at the time. My discovery of _The Anatomy of Intemperance_ was published in _Notes and Queries_.