Synopsis
I study the literature and culture of medieval England. As a researcher, I try to find new angles of approach onto medieval texts for modern readers by situating them in the historical or material contexts of their writing and their reception. Much of my scholarship has focused on the intersection of Middle English literature and the medieval sciences, tracing out the circulation of genres and styles across the domains of natural-philosophical, practical, and literary writing. My current book project, called ‘Subtle Matter,’ approaches the alchemical literature of medieval England as a multilingual, much-overlooked archive of literary thinking and experience. I am also the co-editor of a new critical edition of the Treatise on the Astrolabe for the Cambridge Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer with Jenna Mead.
I am committed to manuscript studies and the practice of scholarly textual editing as critical tools for grounded research into premodern literary culture. Whenever I can, I teach with archival objects as an instructor in the Reading Cultures sequence here at UChicago. I want my first-year students to have the opportunity to explore the Library’s Special Collections, and pursue their own research in unfamiliar intellectual territory, whether that’s antislavery print culture or Bengali art cinema.
Biography
Ph.D., Yale University, 2017
BA, University of Rochester, 2008
Teaching at UChicago Since: 2018
Select Publications
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Select Articles
“Guitar Lessons at Blackfriars: Vernacular Medicine and Preachers’ Style in Henry Daniel’s Liber uricrisiarum.” In Literary Theory and Criticism in the Later Middle Ages: Interpretation, Invention, Imagination, ed. Ardis Butterfield, Ian Johnson, and A. B. Kraebel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. 116–36
“Little Lewis and Latin Folk in Chaucer’s Prologue to the Treatise on the Astrolabe.” JEGP 122.3 (July 2022): 359–82.
“Reading Dives and Pauper in Lisbon, 1465.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 43 (2021): 180–221.
“‘Thorkelin y el Beowulf,’ by Jorge Luis Borges.” PMLA 132.2 (March 2017): 462–70.
“Gower’s Bedside Manner.” New Medieval Literatures 17 (2017): 150–74.
Selected Essays and Reviews
“A Literary Cold Case Heats Up.” Essay in the Chronicle Review. 27 October 2022.
“Alchemy Under the Hood.” Review of The Experimental Fire: Inventing English Alchemy 1300–1700 by Jennifer M. Rampling. Los Angeles Review of Books, 12 May 2021.
“Chaucer’s Traces.” Review of Chaucer: A European Life by Marion Turner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). Los Angeles Review of Books, 26 June 2019.
Teaching
Reading Cultures: Collection, Travel, Exchange I–III
Miracles, Marvels, and Mystics: Ways of Unknowing in Medieval England
Imagining the Pagan in the Middle Ages (co-taught with Julie Orlemanski)
The Archive of Early English Literature: Manuscripts, Books, and Canon
Reading the Known World: Medieval Travel Genres