Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. He received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Toronto and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in California. Before joining UGent he was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at McGill University in Montreal and a Killam Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. His research focuses especially on British literature before 1800; law and literature; the history and theory of satire; the history and theory of the novel; book history and material culture; and cognitive approaches to literature.