I research early modern English literature with a focus in the blue humanities. My dissertation is on poetry that depicts material transformations, specifically when matter changes from one state to another. Matter in Transit: The Poetics of Bodies and Places in Early Modern England considers dissolving poems, deep sea diving, angelic bodies that form out of air, and more. Such transits, as I call them, are always located in specific places and reveal much about how early moderns conceive of and depict bodies, difference, environment, and mutability. The poetry I examine –Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion and The Faerie Queene, Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Milton’s Paradise Lost, John Donne’s lyric, and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis – negotiates the relationship between matter and language that is itself transforming during the 16^th and 17^th Centuries.

I hold an MA in English from the University of Oregon. My thesis, “Love Is in the Air: Reading Desire as Field in Hero and Leander” explores the dynamics of attraction and repulsion in Marlowe’s poem. I argue that the poem’s representations of hyperbolic, cross-ontological, and non-individuated desires reveal an ecological view of the emotions that challenges modern notions of self-experience and plays on rich tensions around gender, sexuality, and agency in early modern English culture.

My other research interests involve queer theory, early modern drama, and comics studies.