English

EDUCATION:
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 2008
M.Phil., Cambridge University, 2002
B.A., Williams College, 2000

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INTERESTS: early modern English literature; rhetoric and poetics; travel, trade, and colonialism; theories of race; Renaissance classicism and anti-classicism, medievalism and anti-medievalism; glosses, commentaries, and paratexts

My current research focuses on the role of geography in the emergence of self-consciously new theories and practices of vernacularity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.  I’m interested in the way that early modern vernacular writers adopt England’s remoteness and insularity as emblems of the virtues and defects of their native tongue, but also in how they refashion classical rhetorical concepts, like topos and metaphor, which define persuasion in terms of proximity and distance, familiarity and foreignness.  In part I’m fascinated by the very dryness of the formal particularities that obsessed early modern rhetoricians and poetic theorists—distinctions between apparently identical figures of speech, for instance, or debates over the origins of rhyme—and I’m attached to the notion that these seemingly tedious preoccupations might yet signal fruitful avenues of critical interpretation.  At the same time, I have a weakness for rhetorical and poetic extravagance: in my scholarship and my teaching I gravitate toward texts that make big claims and bold attempts, successful or otherwise.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

--“The Commonplace and the Far-fetched: Othello’s Persuasive Geography,” forthcoming in English Literary Renaissance.

--“Pastoral in Exile: Spenser and the Poetics of English Alienation,” forthcoming in Spenser Studies.

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES: Major English Poets, Early Modern Theaters of Strangeness