I am a teacher and scholar of American fiction from the late nineteenth century through the contemporary period. My work engages with media theory, narrative, the philosophy of science, and related modes of critical attention that illuminate how novels work as aesthetic and communicative systems and cultural agents. In my first book, Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction (2013), I developed a systems-theoretical account of how media and infrastructure become the self-referring formal sites of communication in the fiction of the early twentieth century, transitioning from the corridors of power to the postwar open plan. Narrative mediation is also the gravitational center of my current manuscript, Novels by Aliens, which is a study of nonhuman narrative sentience and its genre lives in contemporary fiction, critical theory, and the novelistic history that informs them. I teach literature, media, and contemporary thought in a variety of contexts, ranging from transhistorical encounters with genre to graduate writing workshops dedicated to work in the public humanities. I serve on the faculty of the History and Philosophy of Science at Notre Dame, and am a member of the steering committee for the Westville Education Initiative, a transformative prison education program run in partnership with Holy Cross College. I have also joined the faculty of the Bread Loaf School of English, teaching at the Vermont mountain campus. I am committed to the future of serious literary and cultural analysis and dedicate a good deal of my energy to its support. In addition to lecturing extensively in the US and abroad, I co-edit the Post45 book series at Stanford University Press and serve on the steering committee of the Post45 Collective.