Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Fields of Study
- Renaissance Literature
Areas of Interest
- Renaissance Literature
- Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature
- Biography and Life Writing
Biography
My research focuses on the literature of the English and European Renaissance and its reception, especially in Restoration and early Eighteenth-Century England. My first book, Private Lives Made Public: The Invention of Biography in Early Modern England (Duquesne University, Press, 2016), winner of the John T. Shawcross Award from the Milton Society of America, looks at the unprecedented boom in biographical writing following the execution of King Charles I in 1649. It explores the uses to which this newfound biographical populism was put alongside the threat it was understood to pose to a more progressive, argument-driven, and high-minded public culture. My current monograph in progress, Foreign Policy Poetics, presents the early modern lyric as an unexpectedly rich form for exploring Britain's evolving relations with Europe. This book sets out to study the tension (still with us) between Britain's simultaneous integration with and separatist isolation from Europe at a time when an emergent world economy was producing new and compelling theories (also still with us) of the law of war and the international order of nations. Before coming to the University of Toronto, I taught for eleven years in the department of English at Queens College, the City University of New York. I also teach in the interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies Program at Victoria College.
Office Hours
By Appointment.
Publications
Books
Private Lives Made Public: The Invention of Biography in Early Modern England. Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies Series, Duquesne University Press, 2016
Articles
"Whales and Tails: The Spenserian Design of Edmund Waller's ‘Battle of the Summer Islands'." Modern Language Notes (2020). Comparative Literature Special Issue.
"Foreign Policy and the Feast Day: Milton's Poetic Nativity." Milton Studies 55 (2014): 238-75
"Parallel Lives and Literary Legacies: Crusoe's Elder Brother and Defoe's Cavalier," English Literary History 73 (2010): 1061-86
"The Servant and the Grave Robber: Walton's Lives in Restoration England," in Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modern England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker, Oxford University Press, 2008
"Allegorical Insubordination and the 1596 Faerie Queene," Studies in English Literature 48 (2008): 93-109
"Sacred Biography and Sacred Autobiography: Rewriting the Life of the Son in Paradise Regained," in John Milton: Reasoning Words, ed. Kristin A. Pruitt and Charles W. Durham, Susquehanna University Press, 2008
Scholarly Editing
John Aubrey, Brief Lives. The Broadview Anthology of British Literature (BABL), forthcoming