I am media historian, studying the history of the mass market and urban modernity in North America. Overall, my work argues that amusement and leisure help constitute modern publics by providing spaces, rhetorics, and logics for collective gathering. My recent research, Circuits of Cinema, tells the history of film and media distribution from the earliest days of travelling shows to global blockbusters. Collaborating with Sandra Gabriele, a forthcoming book examines the development of the U.S. Sunday newspaper in the 1890s as a cultural technology, animating modernity, central to the institutionalization of mass society.
