I received my PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2013. I teach graduate and undergraduate classes on pre-1800 literature. Recent courses have focused on Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists, science and magic, the global renaissance, theatricality and antitheatricality, gender and sexuality, and the inhuman in early modern literature.

My book, Last Acts: the Art of Dying on the Early Modern Stage (Fordham University Press, 2019), argues that the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater offered playwrights, actors, and audiences important opportunities to practice arts of dying. Early modern plays engage with devotional traditions that understand death less as an occasion for suffering or grieving than as an action to be performed, well or badly. Active deaths belie the narratives of helplessness and loss most often used to analyze representations of mortality, and instead suggest ways that marginalized and constrained subjects might participate in the political, social, and economic management of life. I have articles published or forthcoming in English Literary Renaissance, ELH, Shakespeare Quarterly, and Renaissance Drama, and book chapters in The Shakespearean Death Arts (Palgrave, 2022) and Enchantment and Dis-enchantment in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama: Wonder, the Sacred, and the Supernatural (Routledge, 2016).

I am currently working on two book projects. Bodily Betrayal and Automatic Aesthetics in the Age of Shakespeare explores how involuntary bodily experiences (including tears, laughter, reflex, and exhaustion) generate, solidify, and critique dramatic forms and genres. Contagious Forms investigates historical understandings of literary contagion and replication that predate the models of virality that are dominant today.