My research traces the relationships among reading, labor, and the environment in medieval Britain; I teach medieval literature with a focus on gender, the human/nonhuman divide, material texts, access, and under-studied voices. I also teach poetry and the History and Structure of the English Language. I came to Ithaca College in 2018 from the University of Chicago, where I was a Collegiate Assistant Professor of the Humanities and a Harper-Schmitt Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts.
My current book project, Land and Literacies in Medieval Britain, shows how the management of the land is both a material precondition for and an obsession of medieval British reading and writing. The years between 1000 and 1400 saw major social and ecological changes, including the climatic transition from the medieval warm period to the Little Ice Age. Each century saw different literary efforts to sustain the fiction that the land’s productivity as well as its social meanings were constant and manageable. Medieval elites had deep interests in organizing land and books into meaning together, but so did other, less conventionally literate populations.Land and Literacies shows how different languages negotiated different meanings for land, in frequently complex and unpredictable ways. Peasant populations in the 1300s, for example, used their contingent Latinity as a tool to assert their ability to determine the the social and historical meanings of the land they worked, while English-speaking aristocratic populations a century earlier taught their children the French words for the tools of agricultural labor as a strategy of eliteness maintenance. The book discusses texts in Latin, Old English, Anglo-Norman French, Middle English, Middle Welsh, or, often, a combination of these languages. I'm also working on translating medieval poetry about labor conflicts from Latin, and I am always trying to figure out how medieval forms of meaning-making can help us understand our own world.
I'm a faculty co-advisor, with Derek Adams, of Omega Psi, IC's chapter of the international English honors society Sigma Tau Delta. I'm always excited to collaborate with students on trans-historical and weird projects.
Recent Courses
Reading Middle English
Joan of Arc, 1412-2024
Deep Dive: What Is a Book?
Medieval Mysticisms
Race and Racism in/and the Middle Ages
Slow Read: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin
Studies in Medieval English Literature: The Canterbury Tales
Introduction to Poetry
Medieval Literature
History and Structure of the English Language
Seminar in World Literature: Community, Isolation, Transmission
Publications
"Property and Pessimism: The Problem of Land in the Tale of Gamelyn," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 46 (2024)
“ ‘He should not overlook anything that could ever be of significance’: Knowledge and Vocabulary in Gerefa.” Enlistment: Lists in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Eva von Contzen and James Simpson (Ohio State University Press, 2022)
"Subsistence (Land and Food) in the Squire's Tale," The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales (2017)
“Sustainability Romance: Havelok the Dane’s Political Ecology,” New Medieval Literatures 16 (2016) 83-108
Things in Progress
Land and Literacies in Medieval Britain (book manuscript)
“Domesday Does Nothing for Them: ‘Malicious’ Latinity in the 1370s” (article in progress)
Education
PhD Harvard University (2015)
AM Harvard University (2010)
AB University of Chicago (2008)