• Ph.D., English, University of California, Berkeley, 2007
• A.B., English, summa cum laude, Bryn Mawr College, 1998

Working at the intersection of literary studies, gender, and political theory, my scholarship and teaching investigate how stories of societies’ origins and histories solidify into seemingly inevitable versions of why things are the way they are. I write and teach about early modern British literature, especially that of the English Civil Wars. My interest lies not only in the grip of certain political fictions upon our imaginations, but also in the central role literature plays in originating, circulating, and—crucially—challenging those accounts. The historical flux of the late Renaissance offers the chance to reimagine our received accounts of political organization as not fixed but contingent, one possible story among many.

My first book, Friendship’s Shadows: Women’s Friendship and the Politics of Betrayal in England, 1640-1705 (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), provides an alternative account of state formation in which women writers refashion themselves as central, rather than marginal, to civic life. My current book project, Humanity in Suspension: Gender and International Law in Seventeenth-Century Literature, shows that gender plays a crucial, under-studied role in the origins of human rights in international law. Articulations of human rights that assert universal human equality often collapse under the pressure of differences of ethnicity, gender, and religion. Writers from Shakespeare to Aphra Behn answer this problem not in the expected way, by telling stories about the self, but rather by amplifying literary conventions, so that literary history itself does the work of creating belief in individual rights.

Both projects draw together my interests in queer, feminist, and gender studies; early modern political theory; law; and manuscript studies and history of the book. My teaching includes all these areas, as well as canonical authors such as Shakespeare and, especially, Milton. Most recently, my students have been exploring the archives, researching everything from Helen Mirren’s Excaliburbreastplate (and what it tells us about gender politics) to four-hundred years’ worth of London maps (including a gate to the city that vanished, reappeared in the countryside, and came back to St. Paul’s Cathedral).