Words matter in our world.
Our ability to communicate meaningfully with our fellow citizens is crucial to building a compassionate and sustainable future.
I’m passionate about sharing my love of literature—and my belief in its timeliness—with students, colleagues, and friends.
In addition to my editorial work, I am also a medievalist and literary scholar. Learn more about my current projects!
My research focuses on gender, manuscript studies, and the international contexts of medieval literature.
Creating a new narrative of early literary relations between England and Iberia.
Long before the Spanish Armada of 1588, a network of dynastic ties connected the ruling families of England, Castile, and Portugal. My book project, Marvelous Generations, explores how those connections helped shape literary relations between those countries in the medieval and early modern periods.
Listening to the voices of premodern women.
From stories of virgin martyrs to courtly damsels, from loathly ladies to biblical heroines, medieval audiences encountered countless female figures of desire, deviance, and devotion.
My research and teaching explore representations of female vocality in medieval literature written by and about women.
Exploring what it means to talk about “peace” during a time of perpetual war.
In my book project Demanding Peace during the Hundred Years War, I argue that the paradox of violent peace animates political writing in late medieval England and France. Medieval languages of peace were often inseparable from, and put to the use of, forms of notional and actual violence.
Scrolling through history.
I’ve been studying medieval pedigree rolls for almost fifteen years. They both delight and confound me! Pedigree rolls, genealogies, and roll chronicles were historical documents, objects of power, and conveyers of propaganda.
These manuscripts are a great example of medieval information architecture. My research focuses on how their final membranes represent descent and the transfer of power during the Wars of the Roses.
Analyzing how medieval tropes are used in popular culture.
In TV series and speculative fiction, we often often encounter characters, scenes, and objects that are meant to evoke the Middle Ages. These imagined historical encounters with the past can be used for violent or reparative ends.
In a series of recent articles, I analyze contemporary representations of plague, the events of 1492, and courtly love.