About

I am an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities at Central State University, where I have taught literature and composition courses since autumn 2016. In December 2016, I completed a PhD in English at The Ohio State University, where I was a Presidential Fellow.

My dissertation developed out a year-long dissertation seminar at the Folger Shakespeare Library. I argue that previous criticism has distorted early modern conceptions of character by linking characters too closely with modern questions of depth, subjectivity, and individuality. Recent scholarship resurrects some of the tenets of traditional character criticism by offering theoretically sophisticated claims for reading Shakespeare’s characters as naturalistic. My approach presents an alternative model of character that disentangles how we talk about characters from how we talk about actual persons. Unlike previous critiques of character studies, I contend that characters matter a great deal, but that the ways they make and convey meaning have gone largely unacknowledged by scholarship preoccupied by what characters can supposedly tell us about early modern persons or subjectivity.