About
Welcome to my profile.
I am an environmental historian of late ancient and early medieval Europe, focusing especially on lived religion in the North Sea milieu. My dissertation, “Real and Imagined Undergrounds: A History of Caves in Britain, c. 300 to 1000 CE,” deploys archaeological and literary sources, alongside eco-critical theory, to explore cave use and underground perceptions in both Roman and early medieval Britain. A
Ph.D. candidate (ABD) in Boston College’s History Department, I also teach and advise senior theses at Harvard University in the Department of the History of Science.
Beyond caves, my other research interests include: Christian apocrypha; the history of the museum and museum studies; Pictish stones; Coptic textiles; and, medieval vernacular literature, especially
The Dream of the Rood and
The Legend of the Seven Sleepers. In 2022, I earned a certificate in digital humanities from Boston College. That same year, I attended the University of Göttingen’s inaugural Digital Palaeography Summer School, thanks to financial support from the Medieval Academy of America.
I previously attended Yale University as a Marquand Scholar, where I received an M.A. in religion from the Divinity School. I also hold a B.A. in history and classics from Bard College, where I attended as an Excellence and Equal Cost Scholar. I have also held various editorial and publishing positions, including at Yale Law School and Wiley, and I formerly served as the editor in chief of
Glossolalia, Yale Divinity School’s graduate journal of religion. I am currently a member of the Medieval Academy of America, the European Association of Archaeologists, and the North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature, as well as a charter member of the Global Late Antiquity Society.
Education
Ph.D. (History), Boston College, in progress
Cert. (Digital Humanities), Boston College, 2022
M.A. (Religion), Yale University, 2017
B.A. (History & Classics), Bard College, 2015 Publications
My new translation of the Old English poem, “The Dream of the Rood,” has recently been published in volume 3 of
New Testament Apocrypha (Eerdmans, 2023). To accompany the translation, Samuel Osborn and I co-authored a new introduction to the poem.
My essay, “Durrow’s Lion: Irenaeus, Pictish Stonescapes, and the Book of Durrow’s Non-Hieronymian Evangelical Symbols,” will appear among related studies in
Ì Chaluim Chille: Interdisciplinary Studies on Iona and Columba on the 1500th Anniversary of the Birth of the Saint (Clò Gàidhlig Oilthigh Ghlaschu, 2023).
My book review of Jordan Zweck’s
Epistolary Acts (University of Toronto Press, 2018) was published in
Reading Religion, an online publication of the American Academy of Religion. Also in
Reading Religion, my review of David Ceri Jones et al.’s
A History of Christianity in Wales (University of Wales Press, 2022) is forthcoming.
Projects
In 2023, Christina Cowart-Smith and I co-organized a day-long session (“The Experience of Stone: Materiality, Landscape, Expression”) at the
29th Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists in Belfast, N. Ireland. Owing to the day’s success, we intend to publish a co-edited volume on the subject of stone, containing selected papers from the panel.
My latest article — “Speluncar Slumber and the Medieval Time Traveler: Familiar Caves and Foreign Cities in the Anonymous Old English
Legend of the Seven Sleepers” — is currently under review.
