Formerly at Michigan State University and the University of Southern Alabama. He is currently at work on two books: The Right to the Novel: Undocumented Subjects in the Age of Austen, explores the relationship between cosmopolitan rights, cultures of documentality and novel worlds in fictions by Jane Austen, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe and other Romantic-era writers. The second project, entitled The Sudden: Time, Disaster, Enlightenment, examines the gradual shift from providential to secular accounts of catastrophic events beginning in the seventeenth century and ending in the romantic age.