I completed a PhD in English at the University of Queensland in 2006, and prior to arriving at ANU, held an ARC-funded Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (2007–10) at the University of Sydney and a lectureship in English at the University of Tasmania. 

Appointed to the ANU's Centre for Digital Humanities Research (then the Digital Humanities Hub) in 2011, I headed the Centre from 2011 to 2013. In 2013 I was awarded an ARC-funded Discovery Project to explore Australian and international fiction in digitised 19th-century Australian newspapers (2013–16), and in 2016 moved to a continuing appointment in ANU's School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics. Since that time I have received other ARC grants to extend her exploration of newspaper fiction, including a Special Research Initiative, in 2020, to investigate 20th century newspapers, and a Discovery Grant in 2023, to explore Irishness in Australian literature. From 2018 to 2023 I was an ARC-funded Future Fellow, for a project exploring the relationship computing, reading and writing in literary studies. In 2019 I was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. 

I am author or editor of books including A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History (2018), Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field (2012), Advancing Digital Humanities: Research, Methods, Theories (2014) and Resourceful Reading: The New Empiricism, eResearch and Australian Literary Studies (2009). I have also co-edited the inaugural special issue of Critical AI on "Data Worlds" (2023), the digital collection "To be continued: The Australian Newspaper Fiction Database" (2018-), and a special issue of Australian Literary Studies on "Reading" (2007). 

BA (Hons); PhD; Grad Cert, Education

• Digital Humanities, Computational Literary Studies, Data-Rich Literary History
• Book History, Publishing Studies, Reading and Reception Studies
• Australian Literature, Literature in Australia, Literary Cultures