Teaching Interests

Law and Literature; Landscape and Literature; Memory and Literature; Sense and Sensibility in the Enlightenment; The English and European Novel; Fiction, Narrative, and History; Johnson, Austen, and other authors 1600-1850

Current Projects and Research Interests

1. Book MS on "Narrative and the Ends of Law, 1660-1960"

2. Borges and Johnson. Jorge Luis Borges' Critical and Biographical Commentary on Samuel Johnson in Conversation with Adolfo Bioy Cesares, In Spanish and English. With Introduction and Notes. Co-translated with Manuel Delgado Morales

3. Annotated edition of Anna Williams, Miscellanies in Prose & Verse (1766) for Broadview Books

Essays on China and Japan in Eighteenth-Century England, on Johnson and children, and on Johnson and Tolstoy

Selected Publications

Co-Ed and contributor, Samuel Johnson after 300 Years (Cambridge UP, 2009)

Ed and contributor, Sustaining Literature: Essays on Literature, History, and Culture 1500-1800 (AUP, 2007)

Johnson, Writing, and Memory (Cambridge UP, 2002, 2005)

Boswell: the Life of Johnson (Cambridge UP, 1992, 2008)

Ed and contributor, The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson (Cambridge UP, 1997, 2005)

Co-author, Literary Transmission and Authority: Dryden and Other Writers (Cambridge UP, 1993, 2006)

Ed and contributor, Questioning History: The Postmodern Turn to the Eighteenth Century (AUP, 1998)

Ed and contributor, Making History: Textuality and the Forms of Eighteenth-Century Culture (AUP, 1998)

"Translating Memory: Dryden, Oldham, and Friendship," 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics and Inquiries in the Early Modern Period, ed. Kevin L. Cope, 17 (2009-10).

"Johnson, Ends, and the Possibility of Happiness" in Samuel Johnson After 300 Years (Cambridge UP, 2009), pp. 33-54.

"Translating Difference: The Example of Dryden's Last Parting of Hector and Andromache," Studies in the Literary Imagination, 33:2 (2000), 45-70

"Double Writing: The Erotics of Narrative in Boswell's Life of Johnson," in James Boswell: Psychological Interpretations ed. Donald J. Newman (St. Martin's Press, 1995), pp. 189-214.

Recent Awards

Donald and Mary Hyde Fellow, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Fall 2006

Frederick A. and Marion S. Pottle Fellow, Beinecke Library, Yale University, Spring 2003

Visiting Senior Fellow, St. Edmund's College, Cambridge, 1999-2000

Bogliasco Fellow, Bogliasco Foundation, Italy, Fall 1999