Figures of Speech: Six Histories of Language and Identity in the Age of Revolutions

University of Iowa Press, 2019

Language played an important role at the turn of the nineteenth century as a marker of identity. During this time of revolution and globalization, language served as a way to categorize people within a world that appeared more diverse than ever. Linguistic differences — especially among English-speakers — seemed to validate the emerging national, racial, local, and regional identity categories that were taking shape.

Focusing on six eccentric characters — from the woman known as “Princess Caraboo” to lexicographer Noah Webster — Figures of Speech shows how perceptions about who spoke what language — and how they spoke it — helped English-speakers make sense of their rapidly globalizing world.

Winner, 26th Annual MLA First Book Prize

projects, teaching, and research

early American literature and culture; the history of reading, texts, and text technologies; eighteenth-century British and American literature

typography

selected publications

“Minimismal Monsters in Our Blood and Brains: The Patient’s Psychiatric Germ Theory of 1833.” Literature and Medicine 37:2 (2019). doi: 10.1353/lm.2019.0015

“Types of Reading, Types of Pleasure: Pantographia and the Specimens of Globalization.” Word & Image 34:2 (2018). doi: 10.1080/02666286.2017.1389575

“‘A Dictionary Which We Do Not Want’: Defining America Against Noah Webster, 1783–1810.” William and Mary Quarterly 71:2 (2014). doi: 10.5309/willmaryquar.71.2.0229

“Seeing the Rebel: Or, How to Do Things with Dictionaries in Nineteenth-Century America.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 2:1 (2014). doi: 10.1353/jnc.2014.0013

“Historians Who Look Too Much.” Avidly, a Los Angeles Review of Books Channel. 9 Sept. 2014.

recent and upcoming presentations

“My Lungs Consumed: An Archival Experiment in Nineteenth-Century Medicine.” Society of Early Americanists. South Bend, Ind. June 5–8, 2025.