I am a scholar of early modern literature and, somewhat newly, a creative writer. My work coheres around questions about how stories of human death are told and retold. I’m occupied with how literary genres inform, rehearse, and make meaning of death and in the theatrical and narrative purposes to which we put the dead. Both my scholarly and creative writing is animated by a set of core interests in death studies, replica-production, theory, and critical methodology.  

 

These interests have led to two scholarly monographs focused on rather disparate literary materials. The first is The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution (University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), a book that studies the development of English martyr literature from the late Middle Ages to the execution of King Charles I in 1649. This book considers how the martyrological form—traditionally defined by strict paradigm repetition—attempts to reconcile the broad range of individuals, beliefs, and persecutions seeking legitimation through martyrdom during the tumultuous period of the English Reformation. The second is a study of Shakespeare’s history plays titled  How to Do Things with Dead People: History, Technology, and Temporality from Shakespeare to Warhol (Cornell University Press, 2022). This book contextualizes Shakespeare’s representations of the dead among a transhistorical array of technologies for producing, reproducing, and looking at dead things—technologies like literary doppelgängers, glitch art, photography, ventriloquist puppetry, X-ray imagery, capital punishment machines, and cloning. 

 

As this second scholarly book suggests, my most recent work is transhistorical and interdisciplinary. Beginning with a 2016 essay on a series of self-destroying martyr sculptures by British conceptual artist Michael Landy, I have become increasingly occupied with thinking across periods, technologies, and representational forms. In my first creative nonfiction book, Mother of Stories: An Elegy (forthcoming, Fordham University Press, 2024), this thinking is integrated with personal history to form an autotheoretical meditation on grief. Mother of Stories is a mixed-media project comprised of lyrical memoir, scholarly writing, original art, photographs, and textual artifacts centered on the figure of my mother, an English teacher and compulsive liar who died in 2017 following a toxic exposure to mold. Mother of Stories represents the consciousness of the literary critic as a hybrid formation shaped by an early modern temporal aesthetic that synthesizes the past and the present, the counterfeit, literary, and real. Not only a voice but an agent who materially cuts, folds, and remakes, the project’s grieving critical subject punctures and reconstitutes the limits of both creative nonfiction and the early modern. 

 

Currently, I am editing Measure for Measure for the Arden Shakespeare Fourth Series, and I have recently assumed the position of Villanova’s first Director of Faculty Affairs. In 2023-2024, I will co-lead a year-long graduate and undergraduate exploration of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy with Dr. Chelsea Phillips. The project will culminate in a main stage production of the play in Villanova’s new Mullen Center for the Performing Arts. 

 

Scholarship and teaching areas: 

Late Medieval and Early Modern Literature 

Death Studies, Visual Art and Theory, Critical Theory, Queer and Crip Theory, Photography Studies 

Hagiography, Martyrology, and Passion Drama 

Shakespeare, Shakespeare on Film, Shakespeare in Performance 

The Reformation and Counter-Reformation in England

 

Image Credit: Wilhelm Röntgen, the first X-ray: the hand of Röntgen’s wife, Anna Bertha Ludwig (1895)