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My research examines the role of affective attachment—and its opposite, affective aversion—in the creation, alteration, and use of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English manuscripts, codices, and textual objects. By working with aesthetically displeasing or critically maligned texts, my work is concerned with how people receive and intimately associate themselves, sometimes uncomfortably so, with their objects of interest, affection, or study.
By highlighting the ‘oddity’ of certain kinds of relationships—those that are said to trade in affects of attachment and intimacy—I explore how certain modes of late medieval material manuscript construction and its modern reception (editions, novels, media adaptations) tend to fall outside of the accepted purview of scholarly discourse. In addition to these ‘odd’ relationships, I am interested in the history of medieval studies, its disciplinary legitimization, and how its early adoption of the positivist modes of philological study actively produced certain normative scholarly discourses through which the discipline ultimately defines itself.
Selected Publications
“‘I thought I would be a Chaucerian’: Robert Glück, the Medievalism of New Narrative, and Margery Kempe.” Studies in Medievalism XXXIV: 26-52 (2025).
"Introducing John Ganim's Theatricality, Medievalism, and Orientalism." Literature Compass 21 (10-12): 1-6. (2024).
“Negative Affect, Queer Aesthetics, and the Illuminations of Cleanness.” Exemplaria 33 (2): 109-136 (2021).
Selected Presentations & Lectures
Paper, “‘The Little Rambles of a Merry Traveller’: Rewriting Sexual Violence in Eighteenth Century Chauceriana.” New Chaucer Society. Pasadena California. 2024.
Paper, “‘Bother Hoccleve!’: Bad Feelings Between Frederick J. Furnivall and Thomas Hoccleve.” Modern Language Association. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 2024.
Paper, “‘Humble Affecion’: On the Aesthetics of Affective and Material Attachments in Christ Church 152.” New Chaucer Society. Durham University, July 2022.
Paper, “‘In a stonen statue þat salt sauor habbes’: Anger and the Lithic Body of Lot’s Wife in Cleanness.” International Congress on Medieval Studies. Western Michigan University, May 2021.
Roundtable, “Mourning Materials in Pearl.” Medieval Academy of America. University of Virginia, March 2022.
Organizer, “In Honor of John M. Ganim I: Medieval Theatricality & Performance.” International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, May 2022.
Organizer, “In Honor of John M. Ganim II: Medievalism & Orientalism.” International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, May 2022.
Invited Lecture, “On Being Bound: A Case for Furnivall’s Ambivalent Attachment to Hoccleve” for the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Colloquium Series at the University of Arkansas, February 2022.
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