My Work

Research

Across my work, I show how colonial ideologies of enclosure and containment underlie the seemingly expansive global geographies of early English drama.

My most recent essays have appeared in The Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Renaissance Drama. My work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Book Projects

My first book Colonial Failure and Theatrical Form in Early Modern England: Stages of Unsettlement (OUP 2025) is out now.

A second book on “colonial family plots” locates dramatizations of early modern domesticity at the overlap of the English home, the mass grave, and the settlement. I am also co-editing a collection on technologies of early modern scale with Jennifer Waldron.

Activism

As a scholar of early American conquest, my activist work is dedicated to identifying and working against modern forms of colonial enclosure. I see enclosure as a broad category that links many different social movements and historical moments.

Enclosure logics underpin explicit and implicit structures of social control, from wage labor to the modern prison system. Learn more about my abolitionist and union work here.

About Me

I am an assistant professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, where I am affiliated with the programs in Medieval and Early Modern Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies.

My work is informed by my point of view as a first-generation university graduate, a perspective that motivates me to foreground the implicit assumptions and conventions that govern humanistic work. In my research and teaching, I aim to challenge orthodoxies of knowledge production: how we know what we think we know about the past. In this vein, my work uncovers early modern theatricality’s reliance on the forms, conventions, and habits of thought that emerged from England’s conquest of the Americas.

I am an Arizona Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies Public Fellow affiliated with RaceB4Race. My work has also been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies

In my free time, I enjoy reading Italian thrillers, walking my greyhound, Dino, and playing games (of the board, card, and video varieties). I am also a steward for United Steelworkers Local 1088-04. Feel free to reach out if you’d like to talk about unionizing at your institution!