I’ve lived in a lot of places — Northern Virginia, Pennsylvania, Boston, Oxford, London — but I’m so happy to have landed back in Virginia and here at Hollins. As a scholar, I have at least two (overlapping) identities: literature specialist and medievalist. As a literature scholar, I love that I get to teach a wide variety of literary periods at Hollins, ranging from the the Middle Ages to the present, finding in every era the strange spells that language casts. As a medievalist, I grab every piece of cultural context I can to understand that language and to help me access a culture that is both similar and very foreign to our own. I think those skills — analyzing rhetoric, appreciating beauty, engaging with difference — are essential to life.
Areas of Expertise
- Medieval Literature, with particular focus on Middle English
- Theories of secularism and modernity
- Religion and literature
- History of the Book
- Medievalism
- Speculative Fiction
Courses Taught
- Imaginary Cities
- Close Reading, Critical Writing
- Introduction to Children’s Literature
- From the Spheres to the Stars: Speculative Fiction and Its Literary Ancestors
- History of the English Language
- Medieval Literature
- Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
- Dante’s Divine Comedy
- Medieval Women’s Voices
- Reimagining the Middle Ages
- Milton and His Literary Afterlives
- The Eighteenth-Century Novel
- Senior Research Seminar
Research Interests
- Book manuscript: The Entangled Cities: The New Jerusalem and the Rise of Secular Readership in Late Medieval England
Education
- M.A., Ph.D., Harvard University
- B.A., University of Virginia
Publications & Articles
- Shining Cities: Communal Reading and the New Jerusalem from Maidstone to McCain,” in Reading Cultures: Late Antique to Early Modern Europe, edited by James Simpson, Nicholas Watson, Daniel Donoghue, and Anna Wilson (2022).
- Compiling Sacred and Secular: Sir Orfeo and the Otherworlds of Medieval Miscellanies,” in The Transmission of Medieval Romance: Manuscripts and Metre, edited by Ad Putter and Judith A. Jefferson (Boydell and Brewer, 2018)
- The Entangled Cities: The New Jerusalem and Secular Readership in England, 1300-1600 (in progress)