About
I completed my Ph.D. in English at the University of Connecticut this May. My research focuses on the nexus between English Renaissance literature and the iconoclastic impulses of the Protestant Reformation. I am currently teaching Shakespeare and First-Year Writing at UConn. Education
Ph.D. University of Connecticut, English May 2018
M.A. University of Connecticut, English 2012
B.A. Southern Connecticut State University, English 2004 (cum laude)
Publications
“Resistible Samson: Milton, Iconoclasm, and Nonhuman Agencies in Seventeenth-Century England.” English Literary Renaissance (forthcoming, fall 2019).
“Fragmented Time in Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender.” Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual 31 (2018): 215-41.
“Macbeth goes to Carnival: Otium and Economic Determinism in Scotland, PA.” Literature/Film Quarterly 45.3 (2017).
“The ‘Ornament of the Law’: Vestments and the Translation of Judaism in the Geneva Bible.” Prose Studies 37.3 (2015): 161-80. Projects
I recently completed a dissertation called, “The Return of Dagon: Failed Iconoclasm in Early Modern English Literature,” which I plan to develop into a book. Challenging narratives of disenchantment often tied to the Protestant Reformation, I argue that English iconoclastic controversies inspired a significant body of writing concerned with the spiritual and political agencies of the artifacts under attack by image-breakers. Drawing upon new materialist and ecocritical frameworks, the dissertation explores how such narratives destabilized anthropocentric conceptions of ontological order in the early modern period. The dissertation considers works by Jonson, Shakespeare, Spenser, Cavendish, and Milton, along with several polemical and theological treatises.
