As a medievalist, I primarily work on the earliest English literature, though my interests extend to poetry and poetic theory from all periods and to broader questions about the history of hermeneutics. In my research and teaching, I ask what it meant to read and write a thousand years ago, when English was only just emerging as a written medium. I also have strong interests in enigmatic literature, schoolroom texts, theories of cognition, disability studies, and the reception of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy in the Middle Ages. My current project centers on affect studies; monastic culture; and the aesthetics of attention, distraction, and religious reform in the tenth and eleventh centuries.
My articles have appeared in Anglo-Saxon England, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching, and Carmina Philosophiae: Journal of the International Boethius Society. I am Co-Editor of The Legacy of Boethius in Medieval England: The Consolation and its Afterlives (forthcoming in 2018 from ACMRS) and Dating Beowulf: Studies in Intimacy (in preparation; under contract with Manchester University Press). In 2014 and 2016, I also co-convened two international conferences, Revisiting the Legacy of Boethius in the Middle Ages and the state-of-the-field Digital Britain: New Approaches to the Early Middle Ages. Originally from Virginia, I studied English and Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Columbia University, summa cum laude, before coming to Harvard, where I will receive my PhD in May. This fall, I will start my new job as Assistant Professor of English at UCLA. In my free time, I love to cook, hike, and lurk around farmers markets. I am also a poet, with recent work in Colorado Review and Denver Quarterly. |
"The Plan of St. Gall," a 9th-c. map of an ideal monastery
(St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 1092 A late 10th- or early 11th-c. glossary of rare words
(London, British Library, Harley MS 3376, fol. 1v) |