**I am committed to increasing access to scholarship, but I don’t like getting scraped by AI. If you’d like a copy of any of the below essays, please reach out to me. I’d be happy to send you one**

In my work, I show how commercial theaters were the primary forum in which ideas about territorial and racial enclosure were preserved and disseminated. While enclosure has typically been read as a historical process by which common land is enclosed to enter private possession, it is also an epistemic form that produces seemingly naturalized categories in the form of race, class, free status, and gender.

My first book, Colonial Failure and Theatrical Form in Early Modern England: Stages of Unsettlement argues that English dramatists acknowledged that settler authority was ultimately fragile, based not on the success of permanent settlement in the Americas but on forms of knowledge capture that appropriated aspects of Indigenous worldmaking to center European approaches to reading place. Onstage, dispossession and unsettlement necessarily differentiate between those who were unsettled by their experience in the Americas (English settlers) and those who were not. The plays I examine define European settler knowledge as a failure to grasp the underlying rules and conventions for representing and moving through these new worlds. A version of this argument, “Unsettling The Tempest,” has appeared in Renaissance Drama (2021). By revealing how the expansion of the English stage drew on forms of misreading and failed argumentation from colonial accounts, my work argues that British drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was also, in some sense, American drama.

As my second book will argue, early modern English theater (already a partly enclosed form) helped to formulate and popularize many of these logics of enclosure. This book turns from large-scale renderings of place onstage to the intimate and domestic activity of colonial homemaking. In texts that emphasize the significance of “planting” families in the Americas, representations of homemaking become ways of imagining a future for English domesticity in the Americas and (in turn) a way of domesticating the work of conquest. An early chapter from this second book, “Repeating Englands: The Transatlantic Archipelago and Early Modern Britain” (Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2023) draws on work in archipelagic studies to show how early English settler accounts represent the settler home as an insular refuge in an inchoate ocean of dangers that might link English homemakers to settlers in the Americas.

My Genealogies of Modernity episode for the Ministry of Ideas podcast, titled “Jamestown and the Myth of the Sovereign Family,” was funded by a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities and adapts the historical considerations underpinning my second book – representations of settler domesticity – to think about how myths of settler homemaking made their way into contemporary social movements such as the parental rights and sovereign citizen movements. In all my work, I show how working in and against the settler archive can show us the conceptual horizon of colonial knowledge. While the texts I foreground are colonial texts produced within settler knowledge traditions, they also contain vivid depictions of colonialism’s unmaking.

While most of my research is designed to be useful to scholars in early American studies, Caribbean studies, settler colonial studies, and work on the early modern Atlantic world, I have also translated my work into a public-facing form for general audiences. My short essay, “Getting Lost in the Renaissance” (Routledge Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World, 2024), provides an overview of early modern thinking about “error” – as a form of wandering, as a moral state, and as a way of defining the modern era.