Education 

PhD, State University of New York, Stony Brook, 2002

Areas of Specialization 

   • Romanticism
   • Eighteenth-Century Literature
   • Scottish Literature

Recently Taught Courses 

   • The Historical Novel
   • Enlightenment and its Discontents
   • Romanticism
   • Literature and Society
   • Jane Austen Lives!
   • Frankenstein’s Monsters

Current Research and Activities

   • Editor, John Galt’s Scottish Stories, The Edinburgh Edition of the Selected Works of John Galt (general editor Angela Esterhammer), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025
   • “The Romance of Empire.” The Cambridge Companion to Walter Scott, ed. Ian Duncan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025)
   • Eighteenth-Century Values: a book that examines the emergence of our modern conception of “values” in the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
   • The Time of the Tale: Regional Fiction and the Reordering of Tradition, 1760-1830: book-length study of the Romantic-period tale
   • Co-editor (with Patrick Scott), Studies in Scottish Literature
   • Conference Organizer, The Thirteenth International Walter Scott Conference

Selected Publications 

BOOKS
   • Britain's Bloodless Revolutions: 1688 and the Romantic Reform of Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005; 2nd ed., paperback, 2012).
   • Blackwood's Magazine, 1817-1825, ed., Vol. 2: Selected Prose (6 Vols., general editor Nicholas Mason). London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006.

SELECTED ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS
   •  “Regionalism: Scotland.” The Oxford Handbook of Romantic Prose, ed. Robert Morrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), 247-262
   •  “Kelman, Gray, Welsh, and the New Urban Writing.” The Blackwell Companion to Scottish Literature, ed. Gerard Carruthers (Oxford: Blackwell, 2024), 538-550
   •  “Scott, the Novel, and Capital in the Nineteenth Century.” Scott at 250: Looking Forward, eds. Caroline McCracken-Flesher and Matthew Wickman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), 65-82
   •  “Reading for something other than the Plot in John Galt’s ‘Tales of the West.’” International Companion to John Galt, eds. Gerard Carruthers and Colin Kidd. (Edinburgh: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2017), 110-124
   •  “James Hogg and the Medium of Romantic Prose.” Romantic Circles Praxis: “The Prose of Romanticism,” ed. Yoon Sun Lee (January 2017) https://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/prose/praxis.2016.prose.jarrells.html
   •  “Short Fictional Forms and the Rise of the Tale.” The Oxford History of the Novel in English, 1750-1820, eds. Peter Garside and Karen O’Brien (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 478-494
   •  “We have never been National: Regionalism, Romance, and the Global in Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels.” Global Romanticism: Origins, Orientations, and Engagements, 1760-1820, ed. Evan Gottlieb (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2014), 109-127
   •  “Tales of the Colonies: Blackwood’s Provincialism and British Interests Abroad.” Blackwood’s and Romanticism, eds, Robert Morrison and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), 267-78
   •  “‘Associations Respect[ing] the Past’: Enlightenment and Romantic Historicism.”  A Concise Companion to the Romantic Age, ed. Jon Klancher (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 57-77
   •  “Provincializing Enlightenment: Edinburgh Historicism and the Blackwoodian Regional Tale.” Studies in Romanticism 2 (Summer 2009), 257-277
   •  “Bloodless Revolution and the Form of the Novel.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 1/2 (2003/2004), 24-44

SELECTED REVIEWS and other ESSAYS
   •  “A Glorious Phantom: Insurrections in Scottish Literature.” Studies in Scottish Literature, 46.1 (2020), 3-7. https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol46/iss1/3/
   •  Andrew Franta, Systems Failure: The Uses in Disorder in English Literature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), The Wordsworth Circle, 50.4 (Autumn 2019), 531-537
   •  “Fresh Air: Michel Faber’s Under the Skin, with a comment on Trainspotting.” Studies in Scottish Literature2 (2017): 189-191. https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol43/iss2/6/
   •  “Cultural Nationalism in Scottish Literary Studies: The View from Elsewhere.” Studies in Scottish Literature 41 (2015), 13-18.  http://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/
   •  “Properties of Irish Fiction,” on Claire Connolly’s A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790-1829 and Sara L. Maurer’s The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in 19^th-Century Britain and Ireland. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction3 (Fall 2014), 497-504.
   •  Regina Hewitt, ed., John Galt: Observations and Conjectures (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2012). Studies in Scottish Literature1 (Fall 2014), 228-235.  http://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/

Recent Presentations and Panels

   •  “History as a Mass Experience,” North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR), Washington, DC, August 2024
   •  “Scott and the Insurrection,” The Thirteenth International Walter Scott Conference, Columbia, SC, May 2024
   •  “The Region-Boundedness of the Romantic Tale,” International Conference on Romanticism (ICR), Charleston, SC, October 2021
   •  “Scottish Literature and the Clearances,” Modern Language Association Annual Convention, Seattle, WA, January 2020
   •  “James Hogg and the Extraordinary Time of the Past,” NASSR, Chicago, IL, August 2019
   •  “Collecting and Assembling: A Tale,” ICR, Greenville, SC, October 2018
   •  “Capital in the Nineteenth Century,” Eleventh International Walter Scott Conference, Paris, France, July 2018
   •  “The Value of Improvement,” British Association of Romantic Studies (BARS) conference, York, UK, July 2017