Research Interests:
• Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature and culture
• Early women's writing
• Literature and science
• Literature and philosophy
• Travel literature 
• Fiction and the early English novel
• The history of aesthetics
• The poetics of encounter, especially as they play out in the Asia-Pacific region
• Authors of special interest include Cavendish, Defoe, Swift, and Johnson

Current Research:

Combining literary history, science studies, and the history of ideas, my first monograph, Minds in Motion: Imagining Empiricism in Eighteenth-Century British Travel Literature (2017; 2020), examined British travel literature in the context of the debates about knowledge and authority that dominated the long eighteenth century. In 2020, I published the first teaching edition of Cavendish's Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668) with Broadview Press. This edition includes a substantive introduction and various appendices, including key passages from comporaries like More and Van Helmont, selections from Cavendish's Observations, and never-before printed correspondence between Cavendish and Constantijn Huygens.

I am now co-editing, with Lara Dodds, a complete collection of Cavendish's work for OUP. We hope to release this in 2028. Concomitantly, I am at work on the final chapters of a new mongraph: "Margaret Cavendish: On Writing Out of Time" argues that Cavendish is the first true critic of Enlightenment. Decades before Swift and the later Romantics, she dismantles the aims, methods, and ideals of enlightened modernity even as that program consolidated. 

My work has appeared in such journals as Critical Inquiry (Chicago), Eighteenth-Century Life (Duke UP), Studies in the Novel (JHU Press), Configurations (JHU Press), Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Toronto), and The Review of English Studies (Oxford UP), while it also features in broader public venues (including The Washington Post and The Times Literary Supplement). My research has been supported by The Folger Shakespeare Institute; Australian National University; The Bodleian Library, Oxford; Chawton House Library; Fordham University; National University of Singapore; and the Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE).