I’m a medievalist. My academic research focuses on the convergence of ethics, aesthetics, and emotion in Middle English poetry and religious writing. But my writing and teaching also address lessons that the Middle Ages can offer modernity: lessons in enduring crisis, confronting and overcoming the limits to our agency, and imagining different modes of social organization and belonging. 

Recent public writing

“Illness and Crisis, from Medieval Plague Tracts to Covid-19.” New York Review of Books Daily, March 25, 2020.

Recent journal articles

“Oaths and Everyday Life in Peter Idley’s Instructions,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 119.2 (2020): 190-219.

“Learning from Shame,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 32 (2018): 37-75

“The Idle Readers of Piers Plowman in Print,” New Medieval Literatures 17 (2017): 201-36