About me

I’m an Associate Research Scholar in the Humanities Council at Princeton University. My academic research focuses on emotion, community, and belonging in late medieval English literature and culture. My book, Scorn, Shame, and the Making of a Medieval Reading Public, shows how late medieval writers remade a set of negative emotions, once associated with solitary ascetic withdrawal, into markers of group belonging and poetic self-representation. More generally, I’ve been interested in emotion, interiority, personhood, and ideas about reading and understanding past and present. 

My next major research project will turn to issues of labor, plenitude, and scarcity in the later Middle Ages, tracing the antecedents of modern energy and employment regimes in the literature that bridged premodern London and its hinterland.

I’ve taught courses in medieval and early modern literature at UC Berkeley and Boston University, as well as writing seminars on climate change at Harvard. My CV is here.

You can also find me on Twitter and academia.edu. I don’t check either often, though, so please email me if it’s urgent!