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I joined the Department of English and Creative Writing in 2020 after receiving my PhD from Princeton University. As an interdisciplinary scholar of English literature and drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including Shakespeare, my research concerns the politics of renaissance humanism, broadly construed. My first book, Houses of Correction: Carceral Institutions and Humanist Culture in Early Modern England, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2026. My peer-reviewed articles have appeared in journals including Renaissance Quarterly, English Literary History, Shakespeare Studies, and Milton Studies. I also hold an MFA in poetry from Cornell University. In my teaching, I take inspiration from humanism's emphasis on practical and experiential learning, encouraging a hands-on approach to archives, textual criticism, imaginative writing, and performance. You can read more about my scholarship and teaching online through interviews here ("The Prison Next Door to Shakespeare's Theater") and articles here ("Exhibit Celebrates the 400th Anniversary of Shakespeare's First Folio").
Houses of Correction: Carceral Institutions and Humanist Culture in Early Modern England
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026
More than 250 years before the rise of the modern penitentiary, houses of correction pioneered the use of forced labor and individualized sentences within institutions of confinement, promoting reform and the "hope of amendment" for every individual. Yet these earlier carceral institutions faced many of the problems that remain familiar today: corruption scandals, recidivism, and abuses of power.
Houses of Correction returns to the archives of England's first house of correction, Bridewell, to show how humanist reformers provided ideas, justifications, and administration for what came to be called bridewells, workhouses, and "Literary worke-houses," even as repeated scandals made it clear that these coercive institutions would forever be at odds with the ideals of humanist culture. Examining how the work of writers including More, Shakespeare, and Milton dealt with humanism's entanglements with these new prisons, Houses of Correction constructs the first book-length literary history of some of early modern Europe's most influential carceral institutions.
"Hamlet's 'garbage' and the tragedy of waste," Modern Philology, forthcoming.
"Milton and the Literary Workhouse." Milton Studies, vol. 63 no. 2 (2021).