Scholarship

Book project: Versatile Souls: Nonbinary Ecologies and Medieval English Literature (in progress)

My monograph explores how nonbinary gender challenged dominant views of nature and humanity during the European Middle Ages. Through chapters on gender-variant birds, unclassifiable whales, plant grafting, and ecological grief, I argue that nonbinary gender disrupts the human-nonhuman opposition that was typical of medieval philosophy, presenting a more ecological view of cross-species affinities and interactions. Drawing on a generically diverse range of Latin, French, and English texts from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, I reveal how writers simultaneously critiqued the subjugation of gender-variant humans and nonhuman nature, often while upholding race and class hierarchies.

Certain parts of this project are based on my Ph.D. dissertation, Every Living Soul: Literature and Zoology in England, 1100–1400 (2023).

Special issue: “Trans Natures” (edited with Nat Rivkin). 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 our open access introduction here: “Introduction: Medieval Trans Natures”

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

Thematic essay cluster: “Premodern Digital Ecologies” (edited with Andrew Richmond). Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (2026).

This essay cluster highlights how modern tools and approaches can help scholars to model and explore environments from across the medieval world. In these essays, textual analysis and archaeological fieldwork join with digital mapping, drone-assisted topographical modeling, educational video game design, and online publication of handset, letterpress poetry. As editors, we highlight the term “ecotone,” meaning a transitional region between two ecological communities, as a conceptual link among these diverse approaches. We suggest that the confluence of medieval environments and digital worlds are fertile intellectual grounds.

Open Access Publications

  • “Print Conventions and Authority in Three English Recipe Manuscripts” (with Margaret C. Maurer). Renaissance Studies (2026).
  • “Not Reading the Edition” (with Cassidy Holahan and Whitney Trettien). Futures of Digital Scholarly Editing (2025).
  • “Out of the Woods: The Nature of Gender in Le Roman de Silence.” ISLE (2025).
  • “Birds, Blood, and Nonbinary Bodies in Marie de France’s Yonec.” Medieval Ecocriticisms (2024).
  • “In the Orbit of the Sphere: Sacrobosco’s De sphaera mundi in UPenn MS Codex 1881.” Manuscript Studies (2020).
  • Amplified Edition and Curation for “The Dolphin” (2020); Curations for “Universal Dissolution” (2019). The Pulter Project.

Other Articles and Chapters

  • “Before Objectivity: Pluralizing Science with Premodern Knowledge.” Teaching with Science Writing in the Humanities Classroom (2026).
  • “The Non-Human World: Theories and Sources for Socially Engaged Gender History” (with Clare Davidson). A Cultural History of Gender in the Global Middle Ages (2026).
  • “Animals.” The Routledge Companion to Global Chaucer (2024).
  • “Trans Studies.” The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing (2024).
  • “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).

Books Reviewed

Cover of Reading Nature in the Early Middle Ages: Writing, Language, and Creation in the Latin Physiologus, by Anna Dorofeeva
Cover of Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet, by Michelle R. Warren
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

  • “Asexuality, Queerness, and Nature” (with Danielle Allor). Oxford Handbook of Gender and Sexuality in Late Medieval English Literature.
  • “Environmental and Natural Science: From Climate to Meteorology” (with Tekla Bude). A Cultural History of Nature in the Medieval Era.