My scholarship focuses on the transnational circulation of texts.  As a postdoctoral fellow, I will be working on two projects that consider the relationship between such circulation and English-language literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  The primary project, an expansion of my dissertation, argues that the ambition to succeed in London profoundly shaped Irish, Scottish, and North American fiction of the early nineteenth century.  I explore the strategies resulting from such ambition to show how elite authors learned to accommodate English readers unfamiliar with the local landscapes and circumstances they describe.  Their fiction forms a peripheral Anglophone literary tradition that puts cross-cultural communion to work as an aesthetic value.  This is evident in a variety of ways: both Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott use the conventions of the marriage plot and travel writing to allegorize novelistic communion with English readers.  For Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, the importance of English readers emerges in wide ranging textual revisions they made to their books for London editions. I argue that the literature of the Anglophone periphery makes sense only in the context of the circulation networks that underpin it, networks governed by the politics of cultural capital, unregulated reprinting practices, a robust periodical culture, local reading habits, and intertwined relationships among authors, booksellers, editors, and printers. 

I will also be continuing work on another project, which reconsiders the publications of early black writers by taking seriously the mediating role of print in a transnational economy.  In one essay from this project, I explore the projection of black Atlantic counterpublicity in early African-American orations about the abolition of the slave trade.  In another I argue that the uneven dissemination of the poems and letters in Phillis Wheatley’s Poems and Ignatius Sancho’s Letters troubles the direct line between discourse and identity that readers of Wheatley and Sancho often attempt to trace. This second project will also include media-specific studies of Olaudah Equiano, Benjamin Banneker, and John Marrant.