Presenters

Ania Aizman is an assistant professor of Slavic Languages & Literatures whose work engages 20th and 21st century cultural studies of Russia and East and Central Europe, particularly the intersections of literary, visual, and performing arts with historical events and political ideas. She is currently working on a book called Anarchist Currents in Russian Culture, which tells the stories of artistic, literary, and political anarchists in the Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and the Russian Federation. She has written about anarchist influences on Tolstoy and his famine aid initiatives; the memoirs of “Soviet anarchists;” and Russian performance art and documentary theater. Her work has appeared in a range of publications, including The Slavic Review, The Russian Review, the Slavic and East European Journal, The LA Review of Books, and The New Yorker.

Maria Antoniak is a Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, and also affiliated with Information Science.

Previously, she was a Young Investigator at the Allen Institute for AI and a postdoc at the Pioneer Centre for AI at the University of Copenhagen. She completed her PhD in Information Science at Cornell University, advised by David Mimno, and also received a master’s degree in Computational Linguistics at the University of Washington.

Antoniak's research focuses on natural language processing and cultural analytics, and she develops and critically evaluates computational methods to analyze how language reflects culture and society. She frequently collaborates with interdisciplinary teams in healthcare, the humanities, and the social sciences.

Some recent themes of interest include probes of pretraining datasets, social storytelling in online communities, poetry as data, narrative medicine, and investigations of how people are actually using language models, especially for creative and personal goals.

Michael Bourdaghs is the Robert S. Ingersoll Distinguished Service Professor of East Asian Languages & Cultures. A scholar of modern Japanese literature and culture, he is the author, most recently, of A Fictional Commons: Natsume Sōseki and the Properties of Modern Literature (2020). His previous books include Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-Pop (2012, Japanese translation 2012) and The Dawn That Never Comes: Shimazaki Tōson and Japanese Nationalism (2003). He is also an active translator, including Karatani Kōjin's The Structure of World History: From Modes of Exchange to Modes of Production (2014). He received his Ph.D. in East Asian Literature from Cornell University  and is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship. Bourdaghs is currently writing a book on the Cold War cultures of Japan.

Jason Bridges is Associate Professor of Philosophy at UChicago. His primary research and teaching areas are the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. He also has interests in metaphysics and epistemology, the philosophy of action, the later work of Wittgenstein, and political philosophy.

Lee Kalliroi Buchanan began woodworking at the age of seven in the Kids Carpentry program in her hometown of Berkeley, CA. Lee has a BFA in Art/Semiotics from Brown University (2000) where she studied painting and built sets for the campus theater. In 2008, Lee moved to LA where she ran the collective bespoke furniture woodshop Offerman Woodshop, while also building custom furniture for her own clients. In 2018, Lee left OWS to relaunch and run a non-profit social enterprise called Would Works that provides training and jobs in the craft of woodworking to people experiencing homelessness in LA. Lee has written on the subject of woodworking for various publications including the book Good Clean Fun, Misadventures in Sawdust at Offerman Woodshop, Fine Woodworking Magazine, and Popular Woodworking. Lee is currently working on a how-to project book on woodworking with kids with her old friend and colleague in sawdust, Nick Offerman. Lee has two young kids who are frequent tinkerers in her home woodshop in El Cerrito, CA.

Stephanie Burt is Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. Her work appears in the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, and the London Review of Books, among others. Her other books of poetry and literary criticism — fourteen in all — include We Are Mermaids, Advice from the Lights, and Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems. 

Leslie Buxbaum is Director of Creative Research and Associate Professor of the Practice in the Arts in UChicago’s Theater and Performance Studies Program. Current projects include being bookwriter and co-lyricist for OUT HERE, which will premier at Court Theatre in Spring 2026. As co-founder and resident director of the Chicago-based physical theater company 500 Clown (2000-2010), her projects include 500 Clown Macbeth, 500 Clown Frankenstein, 500 Clown Christmas, and 500 Clown and the Elephant Deal. 500 Clown shows performed in Chicago at Steppenwolf and Lookingglass Theatre, among others, and toured throughout the US, receiving an Association of Performing Arts Presenters Ensemble Theatre Collaborations Grant.

Emily D. Crews is the Executive Director of the Marty Center. In collaboration with its staff and faculty co-directors, she sets the research and programming agenda of the Marty Center. She also acts as its public representative and leads its partnerships with collaborators across the University, the city of Chicago, and beyond. She is a graduate of the University of Chicago Divinity School's PhD program in the History of Religions, and is a scholar of Christianities in Africa and the United States. 

Crews is the co-editor of Remembering Jonathan Z. Smith: A Career and Its Consequence (with Russell McCutcheon, 2020) and African Diaspora Religions in 5 Minutes (with Curtis J. Evans, forthcoming 2024). She has published scholarly articles in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Religion and Theology, and numerous edited volumes, as well as articles for the public in Sightings and The Local Palate. She was recently a scholar-consultant on the Court Theatre’s production of The Gospel at Colonus.

Daisy Delogu is the Howard L. Willett Professor of French Literature in UChicago’s Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. She has been involved with the university’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality for over two decades and currently serves as the Center's Faculty Director. Her research and teaching interests center gender and sexuality, particularly in medieval and early modern French literature. She has published on the querelle des femmes, female authors’ appropriation of male-authored texts, gender performance in medieval poetry, and the feminization of the body politic.

Pranathi Diwakar is a sociologist and postdoctoral researcher and instructor at the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity. Her research and teaching interests are at the intersections of music, media, and performance, caste and social inequality, and urban life. Her ethnographic book project investigates two music scenes situated in the southern Indian city of Chennai to uncover the ways that caste, distinction, and placemaking reinscribe or challenge sociospatial and symbolic boundaries of caste. She received her PhD in Sociology at the University of Chicago, where her dissertation won the 2022 Saller Prize for the most outstanding dissertation in the Social Sciences. 

Stephen J. Dubner is the host of Freakonomics Radio and co-author of the Freakonomics books, which have won many awards and sold millions of copies around the world.

The eighth and last child of an upstate New York newspaperman, Stephen has been writing since he was a child. (His first published work appeared in Highlights magazine.) As an undergraduate at Appalachian State University, he started a rock band that was signed to Arista Records, which landed him in New York City. He ultimately quit playing music to earn an M.F.A. in writing at Columbia University, where he also taught in the English Department. He was an editor and writer at New York magazine and The New York Times before quitting to write books. He is happy he did so. In addition to the Freakonomics series, he is the author of Turbulent Souls (Choosing My Religion), Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper, and the children’s book The Boy With Two Belly Buttons. 

Christopher Ludwig Eisgruber has served as Princeton University’s 20th president since July 2013. He served previously as Princeton’s provost for nine years, beginning in 2004, after joining the Princeton faculty in 2001. As president, Eisgruber has led efforts to increase the representation of low-income and first-generation students at Princeton and other colleges and universities. Princeton’s socioeconomic diversity initiatives have attracted national attention from the New York Times, the Washington Post, 60 Minutes, and other news outlets. Eisgruber has also been a leading voice in Washington and elsewhere for the value of research and liberal arts education. He has also emphasized the importance of both free speech and inclusivity to Princeton’s mission and championed the University’s commitment to service. Eisgruber received his A.B. in physics from Princeton in 1983, graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. He then earned an M.Litt in politics at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and a J.D. cum laude at the University of Chicago Law School.

Martha Feldman is Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Music and the College. She works on vocal practices, genres, and performances, often Italian, from the sixteenth through the twenty-first centuries, including those of madrigalists, courtesans, castrati and other early modern singers, and jazz singers. Her Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2007, winner of the Gordon J. Laing Award of the University of Chicago Press), rethought the institution of opera seria as a total social phenomenon, adapting classic concepts of ritual, festivity, kingship, sacrifice, and myth from anthropology to materialist approaches from microhistory. She's the co-editor on a project called “Errant Voices: Performances beyond Measure” that explores insurgent and resilient voices across trans, raced, and castrato cases.

Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, The New York Times-bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and The New York Times-bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She has several books forthcoming and is also at work on television and film projects. She also has a newsletter, The Audacity, and once had a podcast, The Roxane Gay Agenda.

Amitav Ghosh is a novelist and essayist whose many books include the acclaimed Ibis Trilogy (Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire), Gun Island, Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, and The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. His newest collection of nonfiction is Wild Fictions: Essays on Literature, Empire, and the Environment.

Tom Ginsburg is the Leo Spitz Distinguished Service Professor of International Law and the Faculty Director of UChicago’s Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, as well as the Ludwig and Hilde Wolf Research Scholar, Professor of Political Science, and Faculty Director, Malyi Center for the Study of Institutional and Legal Integrity. His work focuses on comparative and international law from an interdisciplinary perspective. He holds BA, JD, and PhD degrees from the University of California at Berkeley. His latest book is Democracies and International Law (2021), winner of two best book prizes, and his prior books include How to Save a Constitutional Democracy (2018), written with Aziz Z. Huq, which won the best book award from the International Society of Constitutional Law; Judicial Review in New Democracies (2003), which won the C. Herman Pritchett Award from the American Political Science Association; The Endurance of National Constitutions (with Zachary Elkins and James Melton, 2009), which also won a best book prize from APSA; and Judicial Reputation (with Nuno Garoupa, 2015). He currently co-directs the Comparative Constitutions Project, an effort funded by the National Science Foundation to gather and analyze the constitutions of all independent nation-states since 1789.

Adam Green is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity, and History at the University of Chicago.  He has taught at UChicago since 2007, having previously held faculty appointments at Northwestern University and New York University.  His areas of research expertise include post-emancipation African American history, cultural studies, urban studies and intersectional critical race studies. His first book, Selling the Race: Culture and Community in Black Chicago, 1940-1955 (2006), is a widely cited analysis of Black cultural enterprise and creative exchange in modern Chicago.

Paula Clare Harper is an Assistant Professor in UChicago's Department of Music and The College. Her current book project, Viral Musicking and the Rise of Noisy Platforms, documents the early 21st-century rise of ubiquitous social media platforms through an understanding of them as mechanisms for virality. In addition, Paula’s research interests in music, gender, and digital fandom intersect in ongoing work on pop divas including Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. After co-convening the “Taylor Swift Study Day: Eras, Narrative, Digital Music and Media” conference, she is now co-editing the volume Taylor Swift: The Star, The Songs, The Fans. This edited collection uses Swift as a prism for analyzing a variety of timely and intersecting issues in contemporary digital culture and music—from songwriting and copyright, to constructions of race and gender, to fandom and digital reception.

Laura Letinsky has been a Professor at the University of Chicago since 1994.  She shows with Yancey Richardson Gallery, NYC, and Document, Chicago and Lisbon, and exhibits internationally including PhotoEspana, Madrid, Museum of Modern Art, NYC, Mumbai Photography Festival, Mumbai, India, MIT, Cambridge, MA, Basel Design, The Photographers Gallery, London, and Denver Art Museum, CO. Awards include the Maison Dora Maar Residency, France; Canada Council International Residency, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien Residency, Berlin, The Canada Council Project Grants, The Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.

David Levin is the Alice H. and Stanley G. Harris Jr. Distinguished Service Professor of Theater & Performance Studies, Germanic Studies, Cinema & Media Studies, and the College. From 2011-2016 he served as the founding Director of the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, which fosters experimental collaborations between artists and scholars. From 2005-2015, he served as executive editor of the Opera Quarterly, published by Oxford University Press. He is the editor of Opera Through Other Eyes (Stanford, 1994) and the author of Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen: The Dramaturgy of Disavowal(Princeton, 1998) and Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky (Chicago, 2007). In addition to his academic work, Professor Levin has worked as a dramaturg and collaborator for various opera houses in Germany and the United States as well for the choreographers William Forsythe and Saar Magal.

Sally Mann is a Guggenheim Fellow and three-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She was named “America’s Best Photographer” by Time in 2001. In 2021, she received the Prix Pictet and was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame. She has been the subject of two documentaries: Blood Ties (1994), which was nominated for an Academy Award, and What Remains (2006), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Emmy for Best Documentary. Mann’s Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs (2015) received universal critical acclaim, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.

Benjamin Morgan is an Associate Professor in UChicago’s Department of English Language and Literature. His research and teaching focus on literature, science, and aesthetics in the Victorian period and early twentieth century. His first book, The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature(University of Chicago Press, 2017), explores how nineteenth-century sciences of mind and emotion generated new and controversial explanations of the human experience of the arts. His current book project, In Human Scale: The Aesthetics of Climate Change, asks how art and literature try to bring long and vast processes of ecological devastation into human frames of reference. The project argues that this “scalar disjuncture” originates with British industrialization and earth sciences.

Evan Narcisse is the Senior Writer at Brass Lion Entertainment. He's worked as a screenwriter, producer, and narrative design consultant in video games, comic books, film, and TV, often focusing on the intersection of blackness and pop culture. As a journalist and critic, he wrote for The Atlantic, Time Magazine, Kotaku, and The New York Times, in addition to teaching game journalism at New York University and appearances as an expert guest on CNN and NPR. He's also the author of the Rise of the Black Panther graphic novel, Marvel's Black Panther: Wakanda Atlas, and The New Day: Power of Positivity. As a narrative design consultant, he's worked on Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Redfall, Marvel's Avengers, Gotham Knights, and the award-winning Dot's Home. He also served as story producer on the HBO Max documentary Milestone Generations, documenting the rise, fall, and rebirth of the groundbreaking black-owned comics company Milestone Media. A native New Yorker, he now lives in Austin, Texas.

Deborah L. Nelson is Dean of UChicago's Division of the Arts & Humanities and the Helen B. and Frank L. Sulzberger Professor in the Department of English Language & Literature and the College.  She is a renowned scholar whose research focuses on late 20th-century U.S. culture and politics. Nelson’s research interests include American literature and plays, gender and sexuality studies, photography, and Cold War history. Her book Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil won the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize for Best Book of 2017 and the Gordan Laing Prize in 2019 for the most distinguished contribution to the University of Chicago Press by a faculty member. 

Sarah Nooter is Edward Olson Professor in the Department of Classics, Program in Theater and Performance Studies, and Program in Gender Studies and in the College. She writes about Greek drama and modern reception, and also about poetry, the voice, embodiment, and performance. Her first book is When Heroes Sing: Sophocles and the Shifting Soundscape of Tragedy (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and her second is The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus (Cambridge University Press, 2017). She edited a volume called How to Be Queer: An Ancient Guide to Sexuality (Princeton University Press, 2024), and continues to work on an ongoing project on modern African drama and ancient Greek tragedy.

Nick Offerman, actor, humorist, and woodworker, is the New York Times bestselling author of Paddle Your Own Canoe, Gumption, Good Clean Fun, and Where the Deer and the Antelope Play, as well as co-author of The Greatest Love Story Ever Told, with his wife, Megan Mullally. His onscreen credits include the Emmy award-winning role of Bill in The Last of Us (HBO), Ron Swanson on NBC’s Parks and Recreation, and co-host and executive producer of NBC’s Making It. In 2025, Nick will be featured in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, Death by Lightning (Netflix), and as the voices of Papa Smurf’s brother in the Smurfs movie, and Beef Tobin in the FOX animated series, The Great North. Nick and Megan live in Los Angeles, California, with their pups and a fairly decent collection of assorted wood clamps.

Simon Parkin is a British author and journalist for magazines, newspapers and websites. He is contributing writer for the New Yorker, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society His work has been featured in 'The Best American Nonrequired Reading'. He is a finalist in the Foreign Press Association Media Awards and recipient of two awards from the Society of Professional Journalists. Parkin is the author of several non-fiction books, including 'Death by Video Game', a New York Times Book Review 'Recommended Read', and 'A Game of Birds and Wolves', ‘The Island of Extraordinary Captives’, which won the 2023 Wingate Literary Prize, and The Forbidden Garden, a finalist in the 2025 Orwell Prize. Parkin has written about video games throughout his career, including as the video game critic for The Observer newspaper. He also hosts the popular My Perfect Console podcast, in which notable guests pick the five games they would like to install in their very own fictional games machine. He grew up in London, graduated from King’s College, and now lives in West Sussex.

Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He has won many prizes for his teaching, his research on language, cognition, and social relations, and his twelve books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and Rationality. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and one of Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.”

Steven Rings is a music theorist whose research focuses on popular music, voice, and transformational theory. Rings’s second book, What Did You Hear?: The Music of Bob Dylan(University of Chicago Press, 2025), explores the virtues of imperfection in Bob Dylan’s music making. Earlier publications on Dylan include “A Foreign Sound to Your Ear: Bob Dylan Performs ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),’ 1964–2009” (Music Theory Online, 2013), which won the 2014 Outstanding Publication Award from the Society for Music Theory’s Popular Music Interest Group.  

Rings’s first book, Tonality and Transformation (Oxford, 2011) develops a transformational model of tonal hearing, employing it in interpretive essays on music from Bach to Mahler. Rings also co-edited, with Alexander Rehding, The Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory (Oxford, 2019), to which he contributed the chapter on “Tonic.” Both of these volumes received awards from the Society for Music Theory. 

Beginning in 2017, Rings participated in a Mellon-funded collaboration with composer and percussionist Glenn Kotche—best known as the drummer for the band Wilco—under the auspices of the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. In recent years, Rings’s graduate and undergraduate courses have focused extensively on Black experimental musicians ranging from Albert Ayler to Matana Roberts. Earlier seminars explored the concept of melody; the relationship between song, track, and performance in diverse vernacular music traditions; the music of Bob Dylan; Lewinian transformational theory; and musical presence. Rings teaches tonal and post-tonal theory at the undergraduate and graduate levels, the history of theory, and a class on musical interpretation and criticism in the College Core (Music 10400). 

Rings has served on the faculty of the Mannes Institute for Advanced Study in Music Theory and he is the series editor of Oxford Studies in Music Theory. He has also served as Chair of the University of Chicago Society of Fellows and is Resident Dean at Campus North Residential Commons. Rings also co-founded City Elementary, a therapeutic elementary school in Hyde Park. Before becoming a music theorist, Rings was active as a classical guitarist, performing in the U.S. and in Portugal, where he was Professor of Guitar at the Conservatório Regional de Angra do Heroísmo. 

Na’ama Rokem teaches in the Departments of Middle Eastern Studies and Comparative Literature, and is affiliate faculty in Germanic Studies and the Divinity School. She is currently chair of the Department of Comparative Literature, and has served as the faculty director of the Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies. A scholar of German Jewish and Hebrew literature, she has written about the cultural history of the Zionist movement, about bilingualism and self-translation in Jewish culture, and about poetry and poetics. Her book, Zionism in Translation: Encounters in the German-Hebrew Archive, is forthcoming with University of Chicago Press. Since 2022, she has been involved in the Oak Woods Project, serving as PI on several grants associated with the project.

Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. His debut novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His second novel, Absurdistan, was one of the New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year. His novel Super Sad True Love Story won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and became one of the most iconic novels of the decade. His memoir, Little Failure, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. His most recent novel is the New York Times bestseller Our Country Friends. His books have been published in thirty countries. He lives in New York with his wife and son.

Eric Slauter is a specialist in early American cultural, intellectual, legal, and political history. He has published The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (2009) and a series of essays on the language of rights and equality in early America. Slauter recently recorded 12 lectures on the Declaration of Independence for the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York and is completing a book on the Declaration’s origins, meanings, and afterlives. He is Deputy Dean of the Arts & Humanities and Master of the Arts & Humanities Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago, where he is an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, an associate faculty member in the Divinity School, and serves as the founding director of the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture. 

Jacqueline Stewart’s research and teaching explore African American film cultures from the origins of the medium to the present, silent cinema, film spectatorship and exhibition, as well as the archiving and preservation of moving images, and “orphan” media histories –including nontheatrical, amateur, and activist film and video.

Stewart founded the South Side Home Movie Project, a community-centered archival program housed at the University of Chicago’s Arts + Public Life that will celebrate its 20th year in 2025.  She is chair of the National Film Preservation Board, and former director and president of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.  She is host of “Silent Sunday Nights” on Turner Classic Movies (TCM).

Stewart is the author of Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity, which has achieved recognition from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She is co-curator, with Jan-Christopher Horak and Allyson Nadia Field, of the L.A. Rebellion Preservation Project at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, which generated new restorations of landmark films by the “L.A. Rebellion” group of Black independent filmmakers, as well as the edited volume L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema, a symposium, a DVD package and retrospective that toured nationally and internationally.  She is co-editor, with Scott MacDonald, of and William Greaves: Filmmaking as Mission. In 2015, she co-curated, with Charles Musser, the five-disc set Pioneers of African American Cinema for Kino Lorber. 

Stewart is the recipient of numerous honors including a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2023 Silver Light Award from the Association of Moving Image Archivists, and the 2024 Distinguished Career Achievement Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018. 

Ted Underwood is a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Campaign in the School of Information Sciences and also holds an appointment with the Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. After writing two books that describe eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature using familiar critical methods, he turned to new opportunities created by large digital libraries. Since that time, his research has explored literary patterns that become visible across long timelines, when we consider hundreds or thousands of books at once. He recently used machine learning, for instance, to trace the consolidation of detective fiction and science fiction as distinct genres, and to describe the shifting assumptions about gender revealed in literary characterization from 1780 to the present.

He has authored three books about literary history, Distant Horizons (The University of Chicago Press Books, 2019), Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies (Stanford University Press, 2013), and The Work of the Sun: Literature, Science and Political Economy 1760-1860 (New York: Palgrave, 2005).