Mark has been a fellow-in-residence at John Carter Brown Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Peabody Essex Museum, Library Company of Philadelphia, Providence Public Library, and the University of Virginia. He has also received grants from the Bavarian American Academy, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, among others. He has published articles or chapters in American Literary Realism, the Journal of the MMLA, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers and the collection India in the American Imaginary, 1780s-1880s (Palgrave 2017). He has twice received the CASE teaching award.
research interests
Mark's research and teaching focuses on the Early Americas, maritime culture, affect theory, archival studies, and disability. This focus informs his book projects. The first, Crimes Against Feeling Piracy, Sympathy, and Ocean Politics in Antebellum American Legal Culture (University of Massachusetts Press, 2026) is a legal and literary history of piracy as an emotional orientation. The second, in process, "Sentimental Seamen: Emotional Life and Literary Culture in an Early American Age of Sail," studies nineteenth-century sailors' emotional lives via their shipboard manuscripts and artifacts. He has also published on race and disability in the post- Civil War U.S.
