His teaching and research interests center on modern American literature in a transnational context. Within this area, he is interested in theories of cultural transnationalism, the history of media and communications, and the “Pacific” (which includes U.S., Asian American, and East Asian cultures) as a coherent area of study. He also does substantial work in the digital humanities. He is interested in the use of new computational and social scientific methods, such as text mining, to model a form of textual criticism that mediates between distant and close reading approaches.