I am a scholar and writer at work on pornographic literary history. A Professor of English at St. John’s University and specialist in the eighteenth century, my research and teaching spans British literature, the history of sexuality, gender studies, and feminist theory. Since I was a teenager reading romance novels, I’ve been fascinated by what sex does in literature—how it evokes pleasure, curiosity, power, and violence. My research into historical pornography has found it has much to tell us about sex and gender in our past and present. My most recent book, What Pornography Knows, traces currents of feminism and social justice in British pornography from the 1740s to the present. My first book, Excitable Imaginations, examined the convergence of sex with morality, aesthetics, and reading in eighteenth-century literature and philosophy.

My writing and research seeks radical theories of gender and feminism in counterintuitive places—pornography, eighteenth-century marginalia, moral fiction, marriage plots. In addition to my books, my writing appears in scholarly journals and public-facing venues, and this year I gave invited talks on transgender figures in eighteenth-century texts at the University of Sydney and the Australian National University, with work forthcoming on the topic in Studies in English Literature and the Bloomsbury Cultural History of Trans Lives. I have recently cultivated community among eighteenth-century scholars through my work as Reviews Editor for the journal Eighteenth-Century Studies and as Chair of an MLA forum on eighteenth-century British literature; and on campus I cultivate community among writers as Director of the St. John’s University Writing Center.