I develop these propositions in my book Romantic Capabilities (Oxford, 2020), which defines a new object of study, the “media behavior,” and models a historicist methodology for studying it. The ease with which William Blake’s proverbs and pictures spread virally across media platforms teaches us about the politics of virality generally and helps us discover how Blake’s reliance on viral forms was a key part of how his multi-media art contested regulations. The late Victorian vogue for stereoscopic photographs of sites associated with Walter Scott’s novels and poems makes visible the profound break that stereoscopy represented in relation to earlier immersive visual media like panoramas and retroactively brings into focus for us how Scott’s novels had already been representing and theorizing vision in new ways. Jane Austen fanfiction makes apparent how fanfiction amounts to a design medium and helps us recover how Austen was theorizing the novel form as a medium of ecological design.     

I also research how printed texts and visual caricatures interacted in Romantic Britain. My book chapter “The Public and the Limits of Persuasion in the Age of Caricature” reads Georgian visual caricatures as a critique of persuasion and Austen’s novel Persuasion as a critique of Georgian caricature. My article “Reflections in the Print Shop Windows” shows how visual caricatures of Edmund Burke in the 1790s may have attacked the man but actually perpetuated many of the logics he put forth in his political treatise Reflections on the Revolution in France.