I’m an Associate Professor of English and the Pamela Shulman Professor of European and Holocaust Studies at the University of New Hampshire. I specialize in the study of gender and race in medieval English literature, especially in the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. I currently serve as a member of the Editorial Board of Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, held an ACLS faculty fellowship in 2019-2020, and will be a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University in Spring 2023.

I earned my PhD in Medieval Studies from Yale University in 2012. My first book, Father Chaucer: Generating Anxiety in The Canterbury Tales (Oxford: OUP, 2019), offered a provocative reimagining of Chaucer’s masterpiece, arguing that while later poets and critics sought to elevate Chaucer as the patrilineal source of English literature, Chaucer himself was profoundly ambivalent about the human capacity to “sire” earthly legacies. While his Italian humanist peers eagerly claimed poetic genealogies for themselves, Chaucer himself played repeatedly with reproductive metaphor in order to ultimately, if unwillingly, reject the potential of human creation (both poetic and biological). In contrast to his role in the English literary canon as the “Father of English Poetry,” I argue that we should read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as a decades-long negotiation in verse between man’s desire for immortality and his inevitable acquiescence to its impossibility.

My new book, Before They Were White: Making Race at the Dawn of Modernity, represents a significant new contribution to the study of premodern race. This book argues that, in the two centuries immediately preceding England’s participation in the transatlantic slave trade, several competing theories of race coexisted and intersected with one another, none of which were defined primarily by skin color. Surveying a wide assortment of such early racial ideologies, my book focuses on three theories that would prove particularly influential for the history of race-making in later Europe: the racialization of noble blood, the idea of a hereditary Christian race, and the creation of racial nationalisms. In making these arguments, my book seeks to offer new precision to the scholarly discourses about racial self-identification in medieval England, while also asserting that the impetus for premodern race-making was a longing for internal differentiation rather than any “shock” of racial contact. If no Jew or African or Arab had ever crossed the English channel, still the English would have made racial systems for themselves, still they would have endorsed the biological pretenses of social stratification. Working with a wide, multilingual collection of literary and historical sources, Before They Were White offers new insight into the racial ideologies behind some of the most significant literary texts in medieval and early modern English literature— written by Chaucer, Gower, Langland, Hoccleve, and even Shakespeare— while also providing a crucial pre-history for later works of scholarship on the development of race in European thought.