I am an assistant professor of English with a research focus on the English Renaissance and the English literatures of the Americas. My work lies at the intersection of early modern cultural studies, settler colonial studies, and performance theory.
My first book, Colonial Failure and Theatrical Form in Early Modern England: Stages of Unsettlement (Oxford University Press, 2025), shows how English commercial drama’s development as a popular form was deeply imprinted by the textual legacy of early colonial failures in the Americas: from shipwrecks in Arctic Nunungat to colony collapse in what is now Virginia. By linking techniques of dramatic worldmaking to the placemaking strategies and epistemologies of early conquest, Stages of Unsettlement argues that English drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was also, in some sense, American drama. My recent essays have appeared in The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies and Renaissance Drama.
I am currently working on two projects: a book that examines representations of colonial domestic violence in revenge tragedy, tragicomedy, and domestic tragedy, and a co-edited collection (with Jennifer Waldron) on early modern scalar technologies.
My scholarship has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
English Renaissance, English literatures of the Americas, Renaissance literature and culture, art and aesthetics, critical race studies, early American history, and performance theory