I have published two books about Samuel Johnson and am general editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock (the first two volumes appeared in 2016; the next two come out in 2022) as well as volume editor of his penultimate novel, Crotchet Castle (1831). In 2017, Kathryn Sutherland and I published a newly edited and annotated text of Jane Austen’s Teenage Writings for the Oxford World’s Classics series. My most recent book, Jane Austen, Early and Late, was published by Princeton University Press in 2021. I am now writing a book about Johnson's unwritten books.
Other research interests include Pope, Swift, epic and mock-epic, Fielding, Hazlitt, Dickens, German literature (especially Kafka), prose style, fiction, and practical criticism.
I am co-editor, with Christopher Ricks and Seamus Perry, of the journal Essays in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism (OUP).
- Undergraduate: Seventeenth- to nineteenth-century period papers; various special authors and special topics.
- Graduate: MSt in English, 1700-1830.
