My research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century British literature, especially in the contexts of colonialism, imperial expansion, and the migration of people across the world. I range across authors, genres and print forms, and explore questions about the complex kinds of work that literature can perform. How and when do literary texts intersect with works in, for instance, history, the law or political economy? I’m interested in what happens when literary texts move from one continent to another, or across time, often in fragmented forms; and, on a smaller scale, in the various ways that ideas and motifs in literature jump from one text to another, recombined and refracted in the company of others. I have written books about Thomas De Quincey and George Eliot, a study of ideas about child murder in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and most recently a book on literature and migration; and edited volumes on gender politics, 19th-century science and literature, Charles Dickens and the French Revolution, and on nineteenth-century colonial commodity cultures.