Although many of my current projects focus on the United States, I remain committed to trans-Atlantic scholarship. Until the very end of the nineteenth century, the United States refused to recognize international copyright and it was common for literary works to cross the Atlantic. Both British and US literature developed, then, in the context of a fully Anglo-American literary world. (Something similar could be said of our present day, although now literary works written in English not only cross the Atlantic, but span the globe). My first book, The Novel of Purpose (2007), explores the role that nineteenth-century reform movements played in constituting this literary world. I show how the trans-Atlantic campaigns for suffrage and against slavery, along with the crusade against drink, not only brought together a number of the most important writers on both sides of the Atlantic, but also gave them a new conception of what a novelist should be. The result, I argue, was a distinctively Anglo-American realism, one that unites Charles Dickens and George Eliot, Henry James and Mark Twain—and distinguishes them all from the realists of the continent.

I’ve also published a number of essays on trans-Atlantic subjects. Some of these advocate for a trans-Atlantic approach to nineteenth-century literature or explore the consequences of such an approach for our curriculum. Others consider new case studies, such as Anthony Trollope’s relation to the United States, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s relation to Great Britain, or Victorian criticism on the American novel.

Trans-Atlanticism also shapes my teaching, prompting me to offer courses in British as well as US literature—and to teach seminars that pair authors from each nation, most recently, George Eliot and William Dean Howells. Much of my trans-Atlantic teaching is done in “Literary Migrations” courses for the English department’s Common Ground curriculum. One of these courses, “The Bildungsroman Around the World,” follows the novel of education as it travels from mid-nineteenth-century Britain through the early twentieth-century United States to post-independence Africa; we consider how the genre changes as it moves from one nation and period to another. Another, “The American Renaissance and the Irish Revival,” puts two episodes of literary nationalism in comparative perspective—and then considers what US and Irish literature have meant for post-colonial authors around the world.