Scholarship

Book project: Every Living Soul: Literature and Zoology in Late Medieval England (in progress)

This project offers an interdisciplinary perspective on late medieval knowledge of animals, in all its under-acknowledged diversity and sophistication. Reading across scientific and poetic genres, I consider medieval zoology in relation to its textual and experiential sources, its impacts on social hierarchies, and its relevance for ecological activism today. Through case studies of Latin, English, and French texts, I address topics such as: intersections between gender variance and animality, cetacean science, ecological grief, and the philosophical implications of canine cognition.

Edited collection: “Trans Natures” (with Nat Rivkin). Special issue of Medieval Ecocriticisms (2024).

This special issue explores how medieval literatures relate gender variance to landscapes and nonhuman creatures. Its contributors consider questions such as: how do bestiaries and lais use fluidly gendered animals to denaturalize masculinity and femininity? What challenges might the porous bodies of medieval texts pose to notions of trans identities as “unnatural”? How do premodern portrayals of trans and intersex people naturalize racial difference? And how might we return to medieval texts that have been read from an environmental perspective without significant consideration of gender, or vice versa, and begin to bridge these gaps?

Read the introduction here: “Introduction: Medieval Trans Natures” (open access)

Cover of Medieval Ecocriticisms volume 4, showing a half-bird siren and a centuar.

Articles and Book Chapters

  • “Out of the Woods: The Nature of Gender in Le Roman de Silence.” ISLE (2025).
  • “Not Reading the Edition” (with Whitney Trettien and Cassidy Holahan). Futures of Digital Scholarly Editing (2025).
  • “Animals.” The Routledge Companion to Global Chaucer (2024).
  • “Birds, Blood, and Nonbinary Bodies in Marie de France’s Yonec.” Medieval Ecocriticisms (2024). Read for free here.
  • “What the Mole Knows: Experience, Exempla, and Interspecies Dialogue in Albert the Great’s De animalibus.” New Medieval Literatures (2022).
  • “Of Monks and Movable Beasts: Animals as Fellow Travelers in the Navigatio sancti Brendani abbatis.” Viator (2021).
  • “In the Orbit of the Sphere: Sacrobosco’s De sphaera mundi in UPenn MS Codex 1881.” Manuscript Studies (2020). Open access.

Online Scholarly Resources

  • “Trans Studies.” The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing (2024).
  • Amplified Edition and Curation for “The Dolphin” (2020); Curations for “Universal Dissolution” (2019). The Pulter Project. Open access.

Books Reviewed

Cover of Huaiyu Chen's In the Land of Tigers and Snakes: Living with Animals in Medieval Chinese Religions
Cover of Julie Orlemanski's Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England
Cover image of Karl Steel's How Not to Make a Human: Pets, Feral Children, Worms, Sky Burial, Oysters. Environmental History
Cover image of Ru Puro's Each Tree Could Hold a Noose or a House
Cover image of Michael J. Warren's Birds in Medieval English Poetry: Metaphors, Realities, Transformations
Cover image of Sarah Breckenridge Wright's Mobility and Identity in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

Future and Forthcoming

  • Edited collection on “Premodern Digital Ecologies” (with Andrew Richmond). Special issue of Digital Philology.
  • “Before Objectivity: Pluralizing Science with Premodern Knowledge.” Forthcoming in Teaching with Science Writing in the Humanities Classroom.
  • “Environmental and Natural Science: From Climate to Meteorology” (with Tekla Bude). Forthcoming in A Cultural History of Nature in the Medieval Era.
  • “The Non-Human World” (with Clare Davidson). Forthcoming in A Cultural History of Gender in the Global Middle Ages.
  • “Print Conventions and Authority in Three English Recipe Manuscripts” (with Margaret Maurer). Forthcoming in Renaissance Studies.