I am interested in the relationship between the history of the novel and the history of knowledge production. My dissertation, “The Soul of Reading: Digression and the Rise of the Novel,”situates the early realist novel within a broader tradition of digressive, skeptical writing. Focusing on three writers who played a decisive role in the development of realism in Britain—Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, and Walter Scott—I argue that the early realist novel is far more hostile toward science and philosophy than has generally been appreciated.
My other current research interests include the history of geology and the history of the mathematical theory of probability. In the future, I want to write something about bathos in eighteenth-century literature.