Prof. Turnovsky specializes in the cultural history of early modern France and Europe, focusing on print culture, early modern media, authorship, and readership in the 17th and 18th centuries. His book, The Literary Market: Authorship and Modernity in the Old Regime, appeared in 2010. His articles -- on writers (Corneille, Diderot, Rousseau, "marginal" writers) and publishing; and on readers -- have appeared in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (SVEC); Studies in Eighteenth‑Century Culture; Revue de synthèse; and Modern Language Quarterly.

Turnovsky's current research (representative sample here) examines the evolution of reading in early modern France and Europe in light of the expansion, beginning in the 17th century, of a commercial public for printed texts, driven in part by the marketing of reading as a preeminently non‑commercial, spiritually beneficial, individualizing and self-affirming activity.