He completed his doctoral work at Queen's University (1993), before taking up a Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Alberta (1995-97), and then a tenure-track position at the University of Victoria (1997-2000). He has published articles in Victorian Studies, Victorian Review, Novel, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, English Studies in Canada, and Romanticism on the Net, and in several collections of essays, including Literary Couplings and the Construction of Authorship (2006), and The Blackwell Companion to the Victorian Novel (2002). He is currently working on a book-length study of literature and the emergent information economy of the nineteenth century.