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Dr Houghton's research focuses on early modern English literature. She has particular interests in narrative theory, theatre history, gender and sexuality studies, and book history. Her essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, ELH: English Literary History, and The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. She is co-editing, with Dennis Duncan, a volume of essays on the history of the book index.

She is also co-editing, with Colton Valentine, a special issue of the journal Narrative on free indirect style in languages other than English. The issue includes work on French, German, Spanish, Latin, Polish, Russian, Korean, and Chinese literature. Her first monograph, Free Indirect Style Before the Novel, is about emerging methods for representing speech and thought in sixteenth-century English fiction. Free indirect style is associated with the novel, but it has a history that pre-dates the novel as a genre. Lacking novelistic methods (e.g. quotation marks), writers like William Baldwin, George Gascoigne, John Lyly, Thomas Nashe, and Philip Sidney adapted conventions from existing forms such as the dialogue, the sonnet sequence, and the playbook to figure the transition from one voice to another. The result is a disorienting indeterminacy of narrative perspective. The book argues that this early form of free indirect style foregrounds, with particular urgency, narration’s entanglement with the ethical stakes of understanding and giving voice to other people’s experiences.

Her second book project, Awkward Types: Character and Attention in Early Modern English Drama, tells the story of the rise of awkwardness as both a theatrical phenomenon and a new formation of early modern masculinity. From pratfalls and inelegant dancing to awkward silences and deliberately unfunny jokes, awkwardness was a showcase for the performance of sophisticated actorly skills, involving precise control over the body and over the social dynamics of the stage. Awkward Types reanimates the early modern comic actors who played these roles: familiar names like Richard Burbage and Robert Armin, but also less-discussed figures like John Sinklo, Joseph Haines, and Cave Underhill. The charisma of the awkward type, his ability to steal attention away from more prominent players, shows us that the assumed hierarchies of masculine preeminence on the early modern stage were not so assured.