Her first book The View From the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (University of North Carolina Press, 2008) received the John Gardner Maritime Research Award. She is currently in the process of completing her second book The News at the End of the Earth: Oceanic Studies and the Ecomedia of Arctic and Antarctic Exploration, in which she examines polar newspapers and other forms of knowledge that circulate in geophysical and climatic extremity. She recently edited a volume of essays entitled Turns of Event: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies in Motion (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). She is the current President of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists and has previously served as the President of the Melville Society.