About
Beginning Fall 2019, I will be a Lecturer in the Writing Program at the University of Southern California. From 2016-2019, I was an Assistant Professor of English at Briar Cliff University in Sioux City, IA, where I taught a mix of British literature and composition. From 2013-2016, I was a Marion L. Brittain Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia. I attended graduate school at the University of Connecticut, where I specialized in early modern religious literature. I’m currently working on a book project, Writing with the Word: Imitation of Christ and Collaborative Authorship in Early Modern England. Education
University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT
Ph.D. in English, May 2013
M.A. in English, May 2007
Biola University, La Mirada, CA
B.A. in English Literature, summa cum laude, May 2004
Associate student at Keble College, Oxford University, Fall 2003.
Whatcom Community College, Bellingham, WA
A.A.S. with Honors, Honors Program, June 2001 Work Shared in CORE
Articles
Projects
My current book project, Writing with the Word: The Imitation of Christ and Collaborative Authorship in Early Modern England examines early modern writers who made the bold, potentially blasphemous claim that God was their co-author. These writers developed a new form of authorship, which I call “mimetic participation,” that drew on Christian theology’s most important intersection of the human and the divine: “the Word of God,” or Christ and the scriptures. Many early modern Protestants believed “the Word” invited them to imitate Christ as an author and the Bible as a model text, and through imitation to participate in an act of divine authorship. Mimetic participation evolved as these writers combined metaphors drawn from collaborative book production with typology and claims of divine inspiration in order to define a form of authorship that reflected both divine and human participants. Tracing the development of this new, distinctly Protestant form of authorship, Writing with the Word reads literary texts in relationship to book history, historical theology, and sectarian politics to show how writers positioned themselves as both imitators of and collaborators with the divine. By charting the evolution of mimetic participation between the publication of John Bale’s editions of The Examinations of Anne Askew (1546-7) and John Bunyan’s The Holy War (1682), Writing with the Word helps us understand the audacity and complexity of early modern claims that human authorship could reflect divine collaboration. This project is currently being revised and is under consideration at a university press.
