My research and teaching focus on the way cultural forms evolve over time as material conditions change and artists imagine new ways to respond to their lived experience. This interest has led me to explore both the material archive of books, manuscripts, and ephemera that has preserved the texts of earlier periods as well as the history of ideas that are contained within those texts. The productive interaction between the physical form of a book with its literary contents reveals much about the moment in which it was produced. This was the subject of my first book, Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England, in which I analyzed the relationship between visual illustrations and text in works of history printed in the sixteenth century in England. I then went on to write about the way vision and visual images were used figuratively to shape the poetics of two of the period’s major figures: Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser. In Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser, I argue that changing attitudes toward visual representation in Reformation England led poets to invoke visual experience in complex ways with powerful ethical implications. My focus on experience has led to me to read early modern literary texts alongside works of phenomenology. In my most recent book, Immateriality and Early Modern English Literature, I examine the way early modern writers sought to reconcile material experience with beliefs about the importance of the immaterial realm—of unseen forces, ideas, spirits, the soul, and God.
I regularly teach courses in Shakespeare and early modern literature, and my teaching is always deeply intertwined with my research. Other courses I have taught include textual studies, literary theory, aesthetics, and introduction to literature. My courses combine an interest in big questions with a method that emphasizes close reading and attention to historical context. Sometimes this means focusing on a very specific moment in literary history, as when I taught a graduate seminar on the decades leading up to the publication of René Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy. Alternately, I have explored ideas over long periods. This was the approach I used in two separate undergraduate honors tutorials, first on the concept of “beauty” and then on “time.” In those courses we began with Medieval and early modern works and ended with contemporary novels. I see the value of studying literature in its ability to offer a venue for the exploration of the critical social, political, and cultural concerns of the day. Whether I am teaching early modern authors like Shakespeare or contemporary poetry or prose, I emphasize how literature speaks to our present moment.
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