Topics I Research
My research springs from the question, “how does literature shape our desires?” I’m interested in consumer and sexual desire, and less tangible yearnings, for freedom, identity, and lately, efficiency. I wrote one book about addiction in nineteenth-century literature, and another about obsessive reading and collecting. My current book project is a cultural history of logistics -- that is, how we often desire the efficient delivery of things more than the items themselves.
Assembly Codes
The contributors to Assembly Codes examine how media and logistics set the conditions for the circulation of information and culture. They document how logistics—the techniques of organizing and coordinating the movement of materials, bodies, and information—has substantially impacted the production, distribution, and consumption of media.
Inventing the Addict
The notion of addiction has always conjured first-person stories, often beginning with an insidious seduction, followed by compulsion and despair, culminating in recovery and tentative hope for the future. We are all familiar with this form of individual life narrative, but we know far less about its history.
The Mediated Mind
How did we arrive at our contemporary consumer media economy? Why are we now fixated on screens, imbibing information that constantly expires, and longing for more direct or authentic kinds of experience? The Mediated Mind answers these questions by revisiting a previous media revolution, the nineteenth-century explosion of mass print.