In addition to his appointment in the English Department, Professor McKelvy is a member of the European Studies Faculty for International and Area Studies. He has published work on Alfred Tennyson, George Eliot, Thomas Babington Macaulay, John Keble, and the Victorian statesman William Ewart Gladstone. His first book, The English Cult of Literature: devoted readers, 1770-1880 (to be published in 2006), describes how the Victorian habit of giving literature a religious function developed in concert with the politics of religious toleration and the making of a reading nation. Like The English Cult of Literature, his next book-length project is an interdisciplinary study that engages with histories of production and consumption: tentatively entitled Copy Rites, this work focuses on the literary representation of aesthetic reproduction in the age of steam. Areas of related interest include the epic, the Kunstler-roman, historiography, book history, the history of education, the theory and practice of textual criticism, and late eighteenth-century theological controversies.