Curriculum Vitae
Education
Professional Bio
Across my career, I have published eleven books (including anthologies, scholarly editions, edited collections, and a monograph) and well over sixty articles and chapters in books on a variety of subjects. I'm very grateful to have been named the 2018 Honored Scholar in Early American Literature by the MLA Forum in American Literature to 1800, a lifetime achievement award for research and professional accomplishments. At Penn State, I was honored to receive two teaching awards, the Malvin and Lea P. Bank Outstanding Teaching Award, 2016, and the College of the Liberal Arts Teaching Award, 2005.
Research Interests
The first British empire remains the focus of my work, most recently from my perspective as a scholar of Benjamin Franklin. I'm revising my second monograph on Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin's Electrical Diplomacy. The book examines Franklin's work as a negotiator to London and then a diplomat to France in the context of his significant achievements in experimental science. I have delivered talks related to this book at several locations, including the American Philosophical Society (Franklin's society), Library Company of Philadelphia (Franklin's library), the Joseph Priestley House in Northumberland, Pa., and conferences of the Organization of American Historians, the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, and the Pennsylvania Historical Association.
Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire (Oxford University Press, 2015; paperback, 2019), my first extended study of Franklin, examined Franklin's attitudes about trade and populations in the context of the growing number of debates about what it meant to be both liberal and British during the eighteenth century. The book's favorable reviews amply rewarded the two decades I spent writing the book. I am very happy that Academic Studies Press recognized its merits for readers of the Russian language. It was published in Russian in 2025.
A third monograph on Franklin is in progress. Benjamin Franklin, Mediterranean Piracy, and American Slavery examines Franklin's views about enslavement and the relationship between imperialism and piracy. It pays particular attention to Franklin's years of diplomacy in France and his late-life writings, arguing that Franklin had an antislavery agenda beginning in the 1760s, an agenda that finally reached fruition during his years as a diplomat in France.
My scholarship on Franklin has benefited from fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, and the Library Company of Philadelphia. Most recently, I received an Alexander von Humboldt / Yale Macmillan Center History Network fellowship to assist my research toward the monograph on Franklin and the Mediterranean.
Additional work on Franklin includes The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Franklin (2009) and over twenty essays, chapters in books, and review essays on Franklin.
I was awarded the 2012 Bibliographical Society of America's William L. Mitchell Prize, for scholarship in early British periodicals. The prize was awarded for my essay, "Benjamin Franklin's Savage Eloquence: Hoaxes from the Press at Passy, 1782," published in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 152, iv (Dec. 2008), 490-520.
Service to the Profession
I have served a number of professional societies, including the Society of Early Americanists (SEA), which I developed and eventually served as Founding President. I also served the American Literature to 1800 Division of the Modern Language Association. I remain on the Advisory Council of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, a group centered at the University of Pennsylvania. And I have served two double terms on the Council of the Pennsylvania Historical Association. The journal editorial boards I have served include American Literature, Early American Literature, Early American Studies, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. I am a member of the American Antiquarian Society and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.
