About
I teach and write about premodern English literature. I am the author of
Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) and
English Alliterative Verse: Poetic Tradition and Literary History (Cambridge University Press, 2016), which won the 2018 English Association Beatrice White Prize. With Irina Dumitrescu, I edited
The Shapes of Early English Poetry: Style, Form, History (Medieval Institute Publications, 2019). I edit the
Yearbook of Langland Studies with Alastair Bennett and Katharine Breen.
My research focuses on meter and poetics (what makes poetry tick). I am especially interested in poetry from the medieval period, which has led to an interest in periodization itself. All of my scholarship addresses the historicity of early English literature: its forms and cultural meanings, and how those are mediated by modern disciplinary study. My scholarly method bridges “formalism” and “historicism.” I am interested in the social implications of literature, the phenomenology of poetry reading, and how we come to know what we think we know about the past. These interests converge on William Langland’s
Piers Plowman, an enigmatic long alliterative poem of the fourteenth century.
My first two monographs rearticulated English literary history through the cultural lives of metrical traditions, a new approach I call “verse history.” One reviewer praised the methodologies of my second monograph,
Meter and Modernity, as “artisanal philology.”
Education
Ph.D., English Language and Literature, Yale University
M.Phil., Medieval Studies, Yale
B.A., English and Classical Civilization, Wesleyan University Work Shared in CORE
Books
Conference papers
Projects
My current project, Unheard Melodies: Apophatic Poetics in English Literature, brings my interests in phenomenological poetics to the full gamut of English literature, from Beowulf to Claudia Rankine, and to the music of Bob Dylan, with emphasis on the fourteenth and twenty-first centuries. Pivoting historically around John Keats’s translation of Christian theological apophaticism into lyric poetry, Unheard Melodies concerns the paradoxical power of literature to represent what literature cannot represent: novels no one can read, lyrics no one can hear, syllables no one can pronounce, spaces no one can inhabit, experiences no one can have, and more. A separate series of notes and articles reconsiders the Latin poetry of John Gower. Memberships
Early Book Society
Early English Text Society
International Piers Plowman Society
John Gower Society
Medieval Academy of America
Modern Language Association
New Chaucer Society
Sociedad Española de Lengua y Literatura Inglesa Medieval
