She is the author of Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Reprinting and the Embodied Book (2014), and the lead editor of The Wide, Wide World Digital Edition, an exploration of the more than 170 reprints of Susan Warner’s bestselling nineteenth-century novel. She has published several articles on the intersections of book history and digital humanities pedagogy. DeSpain is currently collaborating with scholars in English, history, education, and STEM on the NSF-funded Digital East St. Louis Project, in which middle school students in East St. Louis collaborate to build a digital project about the history and culture of their city.