My principal research interests include Old English and Middle English literature, with particular interests in authority, women’s and LGBTQ+ theory and interpretation, space and place, and medievalisms. My publications demonstrate a wide range of research interests informed by a common theme: social justice. These texts promote inclusion within traditional English literary canons and it contributes to women’s and LGBTQ+ histories that typically neglect the Middle Ages. I use my scholarship to publicize the experiences of marginalized people and the apparatuses of oppression that structure epistemologies, academia, and popular culture. I am committed to participating in these ongoing conversations, which is affirmed by my consistent record of roughly one publication a year for the last ten years.

Recently, I published two pieces that address the tumultuous social conditions of 2020. The first article is about exclusionary tactics in medieval studies and academia more broadly and the latter is a reflection on changing pedagogical practices in the wake of a global pandemic.

First, in “Revolting Sites,” I argue that the power disparities that inform some early English accounts of heaven and hell are sustained by modern medievalisms and medieval studies. Genesis B, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, and Felix’s Life of St Guthlac describe devils and the damned as individuals who challenge the social order and therefore suffer expulsion. Comparatively, Medievalists of Color such as Adam Miyashiro and Mary Rambaran-Olm record similar exclusionary tactics constraining academia. Critically observing the cultural constructedness of exclusive establishments such as heaven and academia reveals transhistorical, patriarchal apparatuses of oppression. This article aims to dismantle both the historical erasure of People of Color and dominant ideologies that reduce marginalized individuals to abstract others, including the damned in early English texts. Narratives of resistance, such as the Devil in Genesis B and accounts by modern Medievalists of Color, employ radical passivity as a rhetorical device that incites empathy. Detailing frustrations with apparatuses of oppression amounts to an act of agency that renders restriction a site of revolt.

Then, in “Creativity, Communication, and Compassion: Working with Students to Create Positive Outcomes amidst the COVID-19 Crisis,” I share the ways in which my feminist teaching practices of transparency and empowering students’ agency in the classroom opened a dialogue about accountability and best practices in response to the global pandemic. Although this piece is an open-access article, it still endured the proper peer-review process. Moreover, I am happy to share some of my teaching practices in freely-available public forum for the purpose of opening this dialogue with colleagues so that we can enhance our pedagogies via such an exchange. Also, this is beneficial for students as well: I am transparent about my teaching practices and expectations, and I have found that students require this reassurance through the difficult circumstances of hybrid classes during the 2020-2021 academic year.

My forthcoming publications maintain this focus on social justice and scholarship as activism. For example, my forthcoming article, “The Cunning Linguist of Agbabi’s ‘The Kiss,’” combines traditional philology, and medieval literatures, with modern texts and trans-temporal social concerns. This critical analysis works across multiple cultures and temporalities, combining Old French, Middle English, and Modern English to talk about sex acts and women’s agency within male-dominated literary traditions. In the Old French fabliaux tradition, sex acts and generic conventions intersect, revealing strategies of power. For example, Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale, a Middle English text that is informed by fabliaux conventions, follows the sexual desires and exchanges of power between men, in the context of a frame narrative that privileges competition between the men of The Canterbury Tales, which is located within English literary canons dominated by men. In “The Kiss,” Patience Agbabi’s modern retelling of The Miller’s Tale, the central woman of the narrative assumes authorial control, and she privileges sex acts that empower women’s voices while both rendering the sexual figurations of Chaucer’s text more literal, and adhering more closely to Old French fabliaux conventions. Agbabi encodes cunnilingus through different languages, including French, Latin, Braille, and English slang, representing the diverse cultural influences that inform English literary traditions, including texts such as The Canterbury Tales. Situating her medievalism, Telling Tales, within a literary genealogy emerging from Chaucer, Caxton, and Shakespeare, Agbabi cites the subversive nature of her source texts to disrupt modern social hierarchies, such as male-dominated literary traditions. The intersections of sexual satisfaction and literary production in “The Kiss,” privilege women’s standpoints. This article, “The Cunning Linguist of Agbabi’s ‘The Kiss,’” contributes to philology, Chaucer studies, multi-cultural medieval literary analysis, and medievalisms by analyzing the Chaucerian influence on contemporary British literature, particularly Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales. I argue that Agbabi retells Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale, continuing the subversive game of quiting, to situate women’s voices within a long, androcentric literary heritage. Close reading Agbabi’s erotic metaphors reveals the poetic innovation that is born of intersectionality. This article is currently under review with the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship.

My earlier publications explore postmodern approaches to canonical medieval English texts as well as a continuing interest in medievalisms. In “Into the Embodied inneweard mod of the Old English Boethius,” I argue that Old English prepositions indicate movement from external observations to internal reflection, and thus emending a central conflict within the Latin source text by identifying intellectual cultivation as a process that requires embodied experience in addition to abstract thinking. I have also published a series of film reviews and journal articles on postmedieval constructions of the Middle Ages, including two pieces in the premier journal for postmedieval representations of the Middle Ages, Studies in Medievalism. Disney films cite medieval material culture, such as manuscripts and castles, to authorize narratives situated within the Middle Ages. The medieval past that is represented in some recent Disney productions, including Maleficent, Sofia the First, and Elena of Avalor, direct audiences back to Disney as an authorized source for medieval narratives. I argue, generally across two articles, that contemporary Disney productions reify patriarchal forces under the veneer of feminism, continuing to limit the roles of women and people of color despite historical evidence that records a more inclusive medieval England.