His research and teaching interests are in literature and history; early American, indigenous, media and memory studies; literary reception, the history of education, and the digital humanities. His first book, On Records: Delaware Indians, Colonists, and the Media of History and Memory (University of Nebraska Press 2012), is on the role of ideologies of language, especially value judgments about written and spoken language, in shaping memories of a conflicted past. His second book, Captive Readers: Literacy and Allegory in Colonial Encounters is on representations of literacy practices in colonial narratives of captivity among Native Americans. Professor Newman is originally from Queens, NY; he came to Stony Brook in 2005 from California, where he earned a Ph.D. in English at UC-Irvine and held a postdoctoral fellowship at University of Southern California.