Research

Publications

2024   “Charity, Neighbors, and Gender in London Godly Sermons: John Downham and William Gouge.” The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, “Population and Society in Medieval and Early Modern England” (vol. 54, no. 3, Sept. 2024).

2022    ““We ought to obey God rather then men”: John Rogers’s Millenarian Hermeneutics and Legal Reform in 1653.” The Seventeenth Century, https://doi.org/10.1080/0268117X.2021.1916778

2019    “Visualizing Suffering: Undergraduate Big Data and Humanities Research on Affect and Politics.” Co-authored with Jessica Hines. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy,  Spring 2020 (Issue 24.2).  

2015    “The ‘Holy dictate of Spare Temperance’: Virtue and Politics in Milton’s A Maske.” The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (2015) 45(2): 395-418.

Under Consideration and in Preparation:

“Recovering Past Conventions: Generative AI and Early Modern English Religious Prose” (Under Consideration)

“From London to Virginia: Education, Conversion, and Spiritual Profit in Seventeenth-Century Virginia” (In Preparation)

Conference Presentations

2024    “From Bengal to London to Virginia: Shaping and Circulating Education in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” accepted to the panel “The Global Renaissance: the Transmission of European Culture in Early Modern Era,” Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America.

2024    “‘More Passion than Reason’: The Ethics of Urban Commerce in Eastward Ho!”, South Central Renaissance Conference, Savannah, Georgia.

2023    “Redefining Charity, Neighborliness, and Mercy in William Gouge’s Sermons,” South Central Renaissance Conference, University of California, Berkeley.

2023    “Profiting from the Middle Ages: William Crashaw and Merchant Virtues, a Computational Approach,” Sewanee Medieval Colloquium. Co-presented with Jessica Hines.

2022    “Desiring knowledge: Paradise Lost VIII and Platonic Vulnerability,” Conference on John Milton, Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Saint Louis University.

2022    “Ethical Consumption,” Computational Methods in Medieval and Renaissance Digital Humanities: A Round Table. 57th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University. Co-organized and presented with Jessica Hines.

2019    “‘What need the bridge much broader than the flood?’: A Collaborative Digital Pedagogy Experiment in Teaching Medieval and Renaissance Texts to STEM Students,” South-Central Renaissance Conference, Texas Tech University. Co-presented with Jessica Hines.

2018    “Gender and Intellectual Boundaries in Sixteenth-Century English and Continental Literature.” Workshop Session. Attending to Early Modern Women, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Continuing Education.

2018    “‘Joynts and bonds’: Passions, Reason, and Shared Authority in the Puritan Household. ” South-Central Renaissance Conference, University of North Georgia.

2014    “‘Una republica tumultuaria’: Prudence and Tumults in Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy,” UVa-Wise Medieval-Renaissance Conference.

In Book VIII of Paradise Lost, after hearing the narrative of the War in Heaven and of Creation, Adam asks the archangel Raphael to explain the motions of the universe. Raphael’s answer is a gentle redirection of Adam’s curiosity towards moral, rather than cosmological, knowledge. He is told to avoid erring in speculation of things “too high” and to “be lowly wise.” Raphael’s advice voices a longstanding tradition of the ethics of rationality, a tradition “contra curiositatem,” stretching from Lactantius to Augustine to Erasmus. This tradition does not forbid scientific speculation in and of itself, but just like Raphael’s advice, it redirects human inquiry towards matters of moral import. Much to the angel’s disconcertment, Adam’s extended response to this advice is a description of Eve as “absolute” and “complete,” and endowed with “greatness of mind.” In Adam’s language, we find Eve presented as self-sufficient while Adam is left vulnerable to the “commotions strange” of eros. At the center of this exchange is Milton’s attempt to articulate how desire facilitates reasoning and discernment by creating a space for ethical inquiry and openness to others.

In my manuscript, Discerning Desire: John Milton and Seventeenth-Century Passionate Reason, I trace how Early Modern accounts of desire are closely linked to contested versions of rational agency. Alongside Milton, seventeenth-century authors—from the playwrights Ben Jonson and Thomas Dekker, to the court chaplain John Preston, to John Donne—deployed the language of erotic and loving desire to articulate an answer to the imperative to be “lowly wise.” In this period, dramatic, poetic, and prose works grapple with the incongruence between, on the one hand, long-standing debates over the relationship between eros and reason and, on the other, new accounts of economic desires and market rationality. The traditional account of eros that Milton and his contemporaries inherited has its roots in Plato’s Symposium and Lysis and the subsequent challenges by Aristotelian and Stoic alternatives. In order to chart the breaks with, and innovations on, older debates over the ethics of desire in the seventeenth century, my work draws on the accounts of Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic traditions by Martha Nussbaum, Paul Ricoeur, William Desmond, and Alasdair MacIntyre. Their writings ground competing valuations of desire in specific historical articulations of the debate between reason and the passions, tracing Plato’s account of erotic rationality, Aristotle’s analysis of the centrality of well-tempered emotions in the education of the virtues, and Seneca’s attack on the passions as enemies of reason. In my reading, these works demonstrate how desire is best understood through dramatization—whether in Plato’s dialogues, Aristotle’s study of tragedy and the passions in The Poetics, or Seneca’s Stoic, but passionate, tragedies. Discerning Desire argues that in the prose and poetry of John Milton we find a supple and evolving response to the challenge of learning to discern through desire.

My interest in the philosophy of desire and its links to social history motivates my digital humanities project, Ethical Consumption Before Capitalism. Complementing historically- and philosophically- informed traditional literary research, this project uses computational methodologies to study England’s early ventures into colonial and commercial global expansion in order to examine how new commodities, markets, and lands are represented in seventeenth-century print. Alongside Dr. Jessica Hines (Whitman College), I have been co-leading a team of graduate and undergraduate students in adapting Natural Language Processing techniques (such as text clustering and word embeddings) to Early Modern texts. We are currently analyzing documents in EEBO-TCP related to the Virginia, Sommers, and East India Companies to reconstruct how company ministers crafted proselytizing and educational discourses to promote England’s international commercial enterprises. Pairing English commerce with global conversion, these texts attempt to uneasily justify economic expansion as a means to advance the Protestant cause—investment in and consumption of new or newly produced goods, such as tobacco and cochineal, is presented as promoting a divinely commanded “profit of souls.”