Publications include Playing the Races: Ethnic Caricture and American Literary Realism (Oxford, 2004); ed. Tales of Henry James, 2nd ed., with Christof Wegelin (Norton, 2002); Charles W. Chesnutt: A Study of the Short Fiction (Twayne,1998); editor, Criticism and the Color Line: Desegregating American Literary Studies (Rutgers, 1996); Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale (Oxford, 1993); "Amerigo's Miraculous Metamorphosis; or, The Logic of Ethnic Caricature in The Golden Bowl," The Henry James Revew 26 (Spring 2005): 130-46; "I Want a Real Coon: Mark Twain and Ethnic Caricature," American Literature (March 2000): 117-52; "'Plenty of Room for Us All:' Participation and Prejudice in Charles Chesnutt's Dialect Fiction," Studies in American Fiction 26 (Autumn, 1998): 131-46.

My research and teaching interests focus on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature and culture.