I specialize in early and late medieval literature and culture with a focus on embodiment and nature in vernacular literatures in England, Scotland, and Iceland. My work asks how literature captures premodern ideas of mutability to reimagine the opaque space where the body ends and relational environments begin. In particular, I am interested in how changeable bodies put pressure on premodern institutional perspectives of seemingly static and fixed forms of life.

In my first book, Mercurial Natures: Chaucer’s Trans Poetics, I examine Chaucer’s reliance on bodily variation as a core instrument of his poetics. By the time Chaucer was writing, myriad thinkers – natural philosophers, theologians, encyclopedists, jurists, alchemists, surgeons, and moralists – spotlit gender variant figures as ciphers to reckon with ideas about the boundaries of the embodied self. Chaucer’s poetry responds to these contemporary discourses by testing just how permeable a body could be and spotlighting the edge cases of figures who resist interpretative capture. Pairing Chaucer’s poetry with literary texts by Gower and Wycliffe, as well as vernacular medical and scientific works by thinkers like Henry Daniel and Thomas Norton, this book considers the literary prehistory of sexological thought emergent in late medieval England. While the habits of thought available to medieval subjects for imagining the elasticity of gender and embodiment varied, Chaucer’s work invokes medicine, science, and labor to anatomize the body as open and porous yet still subject to interpretation and categorization. I offer readings of alternate techniques of bodily knowing among Chaucerian figures, such as the Wife of Bath’s planetary gender science or the Yeoman’s counterfeit poetics, that attempt, but often fail, to remain porous subjects. Essays that reflect the thinking in this book can be found here, here, and here. This project has been supported by the Institute of Advanced Study and the Boston University Center for the Humanities.

Medieval thought viewed the body as a porous system of exchange and my second project extends my work on bodily mutability in medieval literary ambient thought. I am interested in how ambient conditions like temperature and sound can offer new ways of understanding bodily change and relationality on sensory scales. As such, in this project I am interested in texts that contemplate the edges of the body through wildly different atmospheric moods, such as auditory organization in dream visions, encyclopedic information overload, and the slip between temperature and temperament in texts like The Book of Margery Kempe.