• Ph.D., University of Notre Dame, 2005
• M.A., University of Notre Dame, 2004
• B.A., Duke University, 1998

I am a scholar of late-medieval religious writing and culture, but I teach widely, including courses in ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, visual and material culture, drama and performance, poetry and poetics, and service-learning.  I currently lead a campus-wide initiative focused on the environmental arts and humanities through the A+H Futures Program.

Both my teaching and my research are undergirded by an abiding interest in how art, and our close attention to it, can transform us. I am also committed to experiential learning and occasionally lead courses on walking and pilgrimage (for the student blog from a recent pilgrimage course on the Camino de Santiago in Spain, see https://iucamino2019.blogspot.com/).

My first book, Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth Century England (Cambridge, 2010), focused on visual art, vernacular literature, and the rhetorics of religious reform in fifteenth-century England. My second book, Apocalyptic Ecologies: From Creation to Doom in Middle English Literature(Chicago, 2024), examines how medieval adaptations of biblical narratives laid the groundwork for modern environmental thinking, from idealizing primitivisms to environmental apocalypses.

I am currently completing two additional monographs.  The first, Instruments of Christ: Performing the Passion in Early England offers a longue duree study of the social, formal, and theological uses of the arma Christi (objects used in the passion narrative) in image and text from 8th century liturgies to 17^th century lyrics.  The second, a small book of personal essays about walking medieval pilgrimage routes is provisionally titled: Saunter: Medieval Pilgrimages in Modern Europe.