Professor Shea is the author of Spiritual Autobiography in Early America (1968; reprinted with new Preface 1988). He has written on Thomas Morton, Jonathan Edwards, Emerson, and B.F. Skinner, was editor of the Quaker Autobiography of Elizabeth Ashbridge (1990), and edited "American Literature to 1810" for the Columbia Literary History of the United States (1987). "Thomas Morton and the Naming of New England" was awarded the Richard Beale Davis prize by the MLA Early American Division in 1988. A past member of the Editorial Board of Early American Literature, he was also Section Delegate to the MLA General Assembly. He has been recipient of a Fulbright Lectureship to the University of Caen, was a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall Cambridge, and Scholar in Residence at the Rockefeller Study Center, Bellagio Italy. Current interests include 19th Century American women's fiction and Irish drama, and he is completing a case study on American Spiritualism and automatic writing. He is a member of Actors' Equity.