He is the author of Miraculous Plagues: An Epidemiology of Early New England Narrative (Oxford, 2011), which traces the interlocked literary and immunological histories that emerged during the first century of colonial settlement, and demonstrates the ways in which religious and cultural practices evolved as responses to the era’s dynamic epidemiological events. His current book, The Republic of Medicine, examines the ethics of community and treatment in the late eighteenth-century Atlantic world alongside the westward movement of African slave bodies and pathogens. He is an editor of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.