In Professor Brown's work as a teacher and scholar, she studies women writers, slavery and imperialism, species and racial difference, the portrayal of animals, and the imaginative force of “things.” She teaches courses on these topics, as well as on writing in Cornell’s First Year Writing Seminar Program. Her most recent books, Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination and Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century, explore the rise of the modern imaginative engagement with animals and the ways in which cultural history shapes literary form, from the creation of the stock market and the development of urban sanitation, to the public appearances of American Indian and African "princes" who visited London.