Biography
My work primarily focuses on Latin and English literature from the late Middle Ages (1200-1500). I research and teach topics related to literary voice, affect, and desire, ranging from medieval and early modern forms to modern critical theory.
From 2025-26, I am completing my dissertation, “Defamiliarizing Desire: Affect and Ambivalence in Late Medieval English Literature,” under the Mellon Foundation-University of Chicago Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Set during a period of proliferating debate among religious authorities and everyday people over how one ought to feel as a spiritual subject,my dissertation contends that Middle English poets, mystics, and playwrights transformed religious literature from a tool of emotional instruction into a site of aesthetic indeterminacy. I analyze an archive of 13th-15th-century vernacular literature that “defamiliarizes desire” by rendering affective experiences that are inconclusive, anticlimactic, and playfully obscure. This includes the lyric dialogue Stond Wel, Moder, Ounder Rode, the allegorical dream-vision Piers Plowman, the mystical writings of Walter Hilton and Margery Kempe, and various mystery plays. My project advances a broader understanding of medieval affect while arguing that the estranging ambitions of medieval religious literature warrant significant consideration in the history of aesthetic experiments.
From 2022-2024, I was the research assistant for the Piers Plowman project at Critical Editions for Digital Analysis and Research (CEDAR), and I served as the co-coordinator of the University of Chicago’s Medieval Studies Workshop from 2022-2025. I am also part of ongoing collaborative project to transcribe and translate Gerald of Wales’ Latin poetry.
Publications
Review of Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England, by Jordan Kirk. Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 54 (2023): 245-248. https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912696.
CONFERENCE PAPERS
“Maternal Desire/Maternal Disruption: The Lyric Dialogues of Christ and Mary”, MLA 2025
Teaching
Winter 2025: Instructor of Record, Medieval Desire