About

My research focuses on the intersection between ideas and bodies in the Middle Ages. I am particularly interested in how so many of the ideologies that shape medieval literature — paternity and patriarchal authority, race and the racialization of minority communities, social distinction and bloodlines— create mythologies of human flesh, its capacities and limitations.

My first book, Father Chaucer: Generating Authority in The Canterbury Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), argues that we can read Chaucer’s poetic masterpiece as an extended meditation on the failures of human creation, both paternal and poetic.