I am an assistant professor of English at Birmingham-Southern College where I specialize in the literature and culture of the Late Middle Ages. 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. Before joining Birmingham-Southern College, I was Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Duke University. My work has appeared in Exemplaria, Religion & Literature, Journal of Medieval and Modern Studies, and Believing Ancient Women: Feminist Epistomologies, among other venues. I also write 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 early 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. As part of my contributions to this project, I am leading a team using Natural Language Processing approaches based in the programming language R (including topic modelling and Named Entity Recognition) to examine how early monopoly-sponsored sermons worked to craft a series of colonial merchant virtues. The first article from this project on William Crashaw’s concept of spiritual and colonial profit is in process with the goal of submitting it in spring 2023.

 The second project, When Eve Delved: Gender, Nature, and Labor in the 15th Century, examines works by figures such as Robert Henryson, Margery Kempe, and the N-Town plays. Growing out of my research on processes of identification and identity formation, it analyzes how representations of women’s labor and identification with nature raised ethical questions about mankind’s dominion over nature. A chapter from this project on Henryson’s The Preaching of the Swallow is completed and under preparation for submission.