Biography
I am a PhD Candidate in English at the University of Chicago whose research primarily focuses on Latin and English literature from the late Middle Ages (1200-1500). I am interested the history of the self, affect, and desire, from medieval religious discourses to modern literary and critical theory.
My dissertation-in-progress, tentatively titled Defamiliarizing Desire: Devotion and Detachment in Late Medieval Literature, argues that thirteenth- to fifteenth-century English literature’s depictions of affective detachment in response to divine encounter both reflected and cultivated anxieties around the supposed instrumentality of “feeling” as a tool for devotion. Attending to imaginaries of divine encounter that defamiliarize rather than simply stage spiritual desire—including The Book of Margery Kempe, the lyric dialogues of Christ and Mary, Piers Plowman, and the Passion plays—my project evinces how the period’s devotional writing indexes affect’s unstable place in the nexus of the body, mind, and soul. My dissertation seeks to expand our understanding of both premodern affect theory and the aesthetic significance of medieval devotional literature by dealing with accounts of medieval feelings that resist intelligibility and spiritual teleology.
One of my other ongoing projects is a collaborative translation of the complete poems of Gerald of Wales. From 2022-2024, I was the research assistant for the Piers Plowman project at Critical Editions for Digital Analysis and Research (CEDAR), and I have served as the co-coordinator of the University of Chicago’s Medieval Studies Workshop from 2022-present.
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