I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and the Program in Medieval Studies where I study premodern literature and thought from classical antiquity to the early modern period, although with a particular focus on the high and late middle ages (ca.1200-1550). At the intersection of intellectual history and literary criticism, my research and teaching examine the knowledge-making practices encoded in acts of literary composition and thus discern how literary thinking intersects with other modes of discourse such as science, philosophy, and theology.

The chronological scope of my work reflects also its methodological and theoretical aims: I strive to articulate a premodern history of thought that traces how concepts and ideas emerge and develop, and in turn, how these set in motion modes of inquiry associated with modernity. To this end, my dissertation, “Literature and Experiment in Medieval England, 1220-1500,” explores how medieval natural philosophy and literature cultivate the habits of thought and material practices that, in the early modern period, would be labelled experimentalist.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

"Why Medieval Allegory?" review essay of Katharine Breen, Machines of the Mind: Personification in Medieval Literature and Nicolette Zeeman, The Arts of Disruption: Allegory and Piers Plowman. Forthcoming in Qui Parle 30.2 (2021).

Invited Talks

"The Etymologiae in Late Medieval England: Time, History, and the Phenomenology of the Codex." Muilenburg-Koenig History of Religion Workshop. San Francisco Theological Seminary. April 2019.

Selected Conference Presentations

"How to Read an Algorithm: Literary Criticism and Digital Literacies in the Humanities Classroom," 7th Digital Pedagogy Institute. University of Waterloo & Ryerson University, virtual conference. August 2021.

"Langland, Auerbach, and the Materiality of Jewish History." Invited roundtable presentation on "New Work in Piers Plowman." International Piers Plowman Society Virtual Expo. May 2021.

“Alchemical Porosity.” Modern Languge Association (Chaucer Forum). Seattle, Washington. January 2020.

"Codicology as Imaginative Practice." Roundtable presentation on "Critical Bibliography." 54th International Congress on Medieval Studies. Western Michigan University. May 2019.

"Eucharistic Experimentalism and the Middle English Lyric." 54th ICMS. WMU. May 2019. Berkeley Medieval Studies Graduate Prize.

"Augustine, Isidore, Langland, and the Shapes of History." International Piers Plowman Society. University of Miami. April 2019.

"Langland's Encyclopedic Forms." 53rd ICMS. WMU. May 2018.