Publications
B
"Picturing Spenser: Ruth Samson Luborsky on The Shepheardes Calender," Spenser Studies 40 (2026): 83-90.
Patriotism by Proxy: The Civil War Draft and the Cultural Formation of Citizen-Soldiers, 1863-1865 (Oxford University Press, 2020)
- Shakespeare, the Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, and Video , edited with R Burt, (reprinted in Korean, 2002, in English and Japanese, 2005).
- “Let it be Hid: The Pornographic Aesthetic of Shakespeare’s Othello ,” in Women, Violence, and English Renaissance Literature , L Woodbridge and S Beehler (eds.), (2003).
- “Crossing the River Drina: Bosnian Rape Camps and Serb Cultural Memory” in SIGNS , M Hirsch and V Smith (eds.), (2002).
- “The 1599 Bishop’s Ban and Renaissance Pornography” in Enclosure Acts in Early Modern England , R Burt and R Archer (eds.), (1994).
- “Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Women’s Unruly Member,” *Shakespeare Quarterly, 42 (1991) 179-213.
C
Novels:
The Queen of the Night, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, hardcover publication, February 2, 2016; softcover publication, November 2, 2016.
Edinburgh, Welcome Rain, hardcover publication November 2, 2001; Picador, softcover publication, November 9, 2002; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, softcover publication, November 2, 2016.
Recent Essays and Criticism:
"Girl," Best American Essays 2016, Oct 4th, 2016.
"Rich Children," Freeman's, Volume 2, August 2016.
"How I Became A North Korean, by Krys Lee," The New York Times Book Review, Aug 31, 2016.
"The Narrow Door, by Paul Lisicky," The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Feb. 12, 2016.
"Children of the Century," The New Republic, Feb. 2, 2016.
"Heartbreak Hotel: Rick Moody's Hotels of North America," The New Republic, Nov 10, 2015.
"The Race to Build Elon Musk's Hyperloop Heats Up," WSJ: The Future of Everything, Nov. 30, 2015.
"Gender Genre," The New York Times Book Review, Oct 10th, 2014.
Co-editor and contributor, with Sharang Biswas, Solomon Diamond, Liz Gorinsky, and Paula Olson. The Android in the Archives: Research, Collaboration, and Our Speculative Futures. MIT Press, under contract.
D
Books
with Rena J. Mosteirin, Perceptron (punctum books, 2025)
The Birth of Computer Vision (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) [Reviewed in Critical AI, International Journal of Communication, H-Net Reviews, Transbordeur, Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies]
Critical Digital Humanities: The Search for a Methodology (University of Illinois Press, 2019) [Reviewed in American Literary History, Journal of Folklore Research, Choice Reviews, Leonardo Reviews, Pedagogies, Journal of Web Librarianship, Journal of Literary Theory]
with Rena J. Mosteirin, Moonbit (punctum books, 2019)
Modernity and Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century America: Literary Representations of Communication and Transportation Technologies (Palgrave, 2017) [Reviewed in Biography]
E
The Neighboring Text: Henryson, Boccaccio, Chaucer. The University of Notre Dame Press, 2011.
The Digital and Its Discontents, University of Minnesota Press (2024).
F
Forest Primeval. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2016
2016 Hurston Wright Legacy Award
Short-list PEN Open Award
G
"The Con and the Primal Horde," Cultural Critique 122 (Winter 2024)
"Foreclosures of Finitude: On Kiarina Kordela's Epistemontology," Diacritics 49.3 (2021)
Co-editor and introduction, with Joel Goldbach, Inheritance in Psychoanalysis (SUNY Press, 2018)
"Infinite Grief: Freud, Hegel, and Lacan on the Thought of Death," Angelaki 23.6 (2018): 93-110
H
The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England; (1997, Reissued 2006).
"Can assessment-specific marking criteria and electronic comment libraries increase student engagement with assessment and feedback?" Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 2021. With Alison Graham and Sara Marsham.
"Animal and Social Ecologies in Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey," Victorian Literature and Culture 48.3 (2020): 577-99.
"Bush Animals, Developmental Time, and Colonial Identity in Victorian Australian Children's Fiction," in Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture, eds. Brenda Ayres and Sarah Elizabeth Maier. New York: Routledge, 2019.
"Geopolitical Temporalities and Animal Ecologies in The Jungle Books," Victorian Review 45 (2019): 135-52.
"The 'Animality' of Speech and Translation in The Jungle Books," in Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a Leash, ed. Brenda Ayres. New York: Routledge, 2019.
"Professional Victorianisms: Immediacy, Urgency, and Interdisciplinarity in/at Work," Nineteenth-Century Contexts 39.4 (September 2017): 249-67. With Winter Werner, Paula Krebs, and Liz McCabe.
"Physiognomic Discourse and the Trials of Cross-Class Sympathy in Mary Barton," Victorian Literature and Culture 43.4 (2015): 705-724.
"Reading the 'Postal Effect' of John Caldigate as a Challenge to Victorian Post-Colonialism," Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature (March 2015).
"'Loose from Wholesome Guidance:' Phrenology's and Physiognomy's Narrative of Anxiety," ELN 47.2 (Fall/Winter 2009): 61-73.
- The Radiant (poems), (2003).
- The Salt House: A Summer on the Dunes of Cape Cod , (1999; paperback 2003).
- Two poems: “Visions of the Virgin on the Old Rail Trail” and “Everything is Alive.”
- We Have Gone to the Beach (poems), (1996).
- The Fish-Wife (poems), (1986).
L
Book: "Single Imperfection": Milton, Marriage and Friendship. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005
M
Popular Literature, Authorship and the Occult in Late Victorian Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
"Racial Strategies in Jane Eyre," Victorian Literature and Culture (2009).
"Triangular Voyages: Locating the Transnational Caribbean Woman in Paule Marshall's 'To Da-duh, in Memoriam.'" Special Issue Editor Jennifer Williams. Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, (Fall 2017).
O
Were Were Kings, (Mulholland; Little, Brown & Co., 2016).
Serpents in the Cold, (Mulholland; Little, Brown & Co., 2016). Paperback
Serpents in the Cold, (Mulholland; Little, Brown & Co., 2015). Hardback
This Magnificent Desolation, (Bloomsbury USA, 2013).
In the Province of Saints, (Little Brown, & Co., 2005).
Esther Stories, (Houghton Mifflin, 2001, re-issue with a forward by Marilynne Robinson, Little Brown, 2013)
The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, (Little Brown, 2006)
Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives, (Voice of Witness/ McSweeney's, 2008) (editor)
Love and Shame and Love, (Little, Brown, 2011)
Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives (Voice of Witness/ McSweeney's, 2011)
Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, (Little Brown, 2013)
Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Reading to Live and Living to Read, (Catapult, 2016)
Lavil: Life, Love, and Death in Port-au-Prince (Voice of Witness/ McSweeney's/ Verso Press, 2017)
Maggie Brown & Others, (forthcoming, Little, Brown, 2019)
P
.“Ahab’s Electromagnetic Constitution,” Ahab Unbound,Melville and the Materialist Turn, Eds., Meredith Farmer, Jonathan Schroeder (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2022).
R
Houses of Correction: Carceral Institutions and Humanist Culture in Early Modern England
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026
More than 250 years before the rise of the modern penitentiary, houses of correction pioneered the use of forced labor and individualized sentences within institutions of confinement, promoting reform and the "hope of amendment" for every individual. Yet these earlier carceral institutions faced many of the problems that remain familiar today: corruption scandals, recidivism, and abuses of power.
Houses of Correction returns to the archives of England's first house of correction, Bridewell, to show how humanist reformers provided ideas, justifications, and administration for what came to be called bridewells, workhouses, and "Literary worke-houses," even as repeated scandals made it clear that these coercive institutions would forever be at odds with the ideals of humanist culture. Examining how the work of writers including More, Shakespeare, and Milton dealt with humanism's entanglements with these new prisons, Houses of Correction constructs the first book-length literary history of some of early modern Europe's most influential carceral institutions.
S
"Sex, Gender, and Seduction in Early American Literature." The Blackwell Companion to American Literature. vol. 1. Eds. Susan Belasco, Theresa Strouth Gaul, Linck Johnson, and Michael Soto, 2020.
T
BOOKS
The Weird South: Ecologies of Unknowing in Postplantation Literature (Mercer University Lamar Lecture Series no. 61, University of Georgia Press, 2025)
The Indian in American Southern Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
Reconstructing the Native South: American Indian Literature and the Lost Cause (University of Georgia Press, 2012)
Disturbing Calculations: The Economics of Identity in Postcolonial Southern Literature, 1912-2002 (University of Georgia Press, 2008).
EDITED VOLUMES & JOURNAL ISSUES:
The Cambridge Companion to Native American Poetry (Cambridge University Press, in preparation)
The Cambridge Companion to the Native American Novel (Cambridge University Press, in preparation)
Norton Critical Edition of William Faulkner's Light in August (Norton, 2023)
"Indigeneity and the Anthropocene," Theories & Methodologies Forum in PMLA (January 2021)
The Cambridge History of Native American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
I Am Where I Come From: Native American College Students and Graduates Tell Their Life Stories, eds. Andrew Garrod, Robert Kilkenny, and Melanie Benson Taylor (Cornell University Press, 2016)
W
Prophetic Leadership and Visionary Hope: New Essays on the Work of Cornel West. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023.
Z
"The Ecopoetics of Survival: The Transborder Immigrant Tool and The Desert Survival Series," Ecozona Vol 10 No 1 (2019): Toward an Ecopoetics of Randomness and Design.
"Elizabeth Bishop's Immersion in 'The Riverman',"" in Reading Elizabeth Bishop: An Edinburgh Companion), ed. Jonathan Ellis, 2019.
"'Less Than Perfect': Negotiating Breast Cancer in Popular Romance Novels." Tulsa Studies In Women's Literature (Special Issue on Breast Cancer Literature), 32.2/33.1
"Grace Paley's Poetics of Breath," Contemporary Women's Writing 2009 3(2):158-163
Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality, and the Changing Shapes of Elegy
(Cornell University Press, 1997)