My research and teaching focus on early modern drama, poetry, and the histories of philosophy and science. I am particularly interested in literary figurations of corporeality, sensate embodiment, mental activity, and ecology—as they appear within the philosophical domain of virtue ethics, as part of the early life sciences and biopolitical organization of labor and social reproduction, and in their longstanding connections to the theory and craft of poiesis. In this way, my work takes up ancient questions concerning the nature of the good life, human flourishing, and cosmopolitanism, while also asking how the rise of capitalist political economy fundamentally alters and constrains the parameters of ethical life as well as our understanding of value and community.

My first book, Vital Strife: Sleep, Insomnia, and the Early Modern Ethics of Care (Cornell 2022) approaches some of these concerns through an examination of the close yet puzzling relationship between sleep and ethical care in early modernity. Vital Strife received the International Spenser Society’s Isabel MacCaffrey Award (2024), the Milton Society of America’s John T. Shawcross Award (2023), and was shortlisted for the Shakespeare Association of America’s Jerome Singerman Award (2023). At the moment I am working on two new book projects. The first, The Demonic Cosmos: Early Modern Infinity and the Poetics of Night, reads nocturnal poetics across a range of traditions as techniques for seeing infinitely in cosmological, aesthetic, and ontological dimensions. The second, Endless Goods: Early Modern Virtue and Political Economy, argues that early modern drama grapples with the transition from feudalism to capitalism through figures of endlessness that respond to crises in the understanding and social distribution of ethical, spiritual, economic, and racial forms of value.

My work has appeared in Shakespeare Studies, Modern Philology, SEL: Studies in English Literature, and ELH, and I have contributed chapters to edited collections from Cambridge, Penn State, and Edinburgh University Presses. I taught at Haverford College and the University of Pittsburgh before joining the faculty at Rice, and have been a Society Fellow at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities.