He received his Ph.D. in English language and literature from the University of Virginia. His research and teaching areas include British Victorian literature, nineteenth-century book and media history, scholarly communications, and digital humanities. He has recently published his first book, By Accident or Design: Writing the Victorian Metropolis (Oxford University Press, 2015), and is now working on a study of historical communications media, a project to virtually reconstruct Queen Victoria’s lost garden pavilion, and content mining research in digital collections of nineteenth-century periodicals.