I am a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Whitman College where I specialize in Medieval and Early Modern literature and culture. I have a particular interest in the intersection of sexuality, religion, and race, as well as medieval and classical theories of ethics and the emotions. I hold a Ph.D. in English from Duke University and a B.A. degree from Sewanee: The University of the South. My work has appeared in Exemplaria, Religion & Literature, Journal of Medieval and Modern Studies, and Believing Ancient Women: Feminist Epistomologies (Edinburgh University Press), among other venues. I also write Public essays, including articles on the history of banning queer books for The Conversation and essays for Ploughshares on a range of topics including modern representations of medieval violence, the history of attention, and grief and literature.

With the support of fellowships from the Huntington Library and the Early Modern Conversions Project, I have completed my monograph, Forms of Suffering: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Chaucerian Pity, which is currently under review. This project examines the development and transformation of the language of pity in medieval literature and culture through a study of the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. I argue that Chaucer reformulated trans-European pity discourses for an English audience, and, in the process, made pity a central ethical and aesthetic concern in English literature. Moreover, a study of Chaucerian and medieval pity discourse, I contend, is essential for understanding long histories of misogyny, class violence, and racism.

I am also developing two other projects (one digital and one monograph) investigating the social politics of language in medieval and Early Modern English and American cultures. The first is a collaborative digital project formed in partnership with the Rhodes Information Initiative at Duke University. Ethical Consumption Before Capitalism analyzes the language of consumption in early print books using computational methods (topic modeling and word embeddings). These methods allow us to track large-scale patterns in the ways that early global monopolies—the Virginia Company, the East India Company, and the Levant Company—linked consumption with ethics and theology. This project is structed around faculty-student collaboration, and I lead a team of mixed graduate and undergraduate students at Duke and Whitman in using Natural Language Processing approaches to examine how monopoly-sponsored sermons worked to craft a series of colonial merchant virtues.

The second project, When Eve Delved: Gender, Nature, and Labor in the 15th Century, examines works by authors such as Robert Henryson, Margery Kempe, and the N-Town. Focused on the 15th century when the Medieval Warm Period was ending and bleak winters were occurring with increasing frequency, this project studies how literary images of women's agricultural labor transformed with the changing climate. It suggests that the imagery and narrative of women's agricultural labor was an important site around which medieval people negotiated their anxiety about living in and alongside a natural world seemingly grown colder and more hostile. A chapter from this project on Henryson’s The Preaching of the Swallow is under preparation for submission to The Journal of English and Germanic Philology.