His main area of specialization is early American literature. He is the author of Divergent Visions, Contested Spaces: The Early United States through the Lens of Travel (Routledge, 2006), a study of real and imagined travels in the Early Republic and the antebellum period. He is currently finishing a book on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s late career, the period from 1861 until the poet’s death in 1882. In 2015, he was awarded the Diana Korzenik Research Fellowship from the Friends of the Longfellow House-Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site to research the letters and journals of Frances Elizabeth Appleton Longfellow, the wife of the poet.