Assistant Professor
I specialize in early and late medieval literature and culture with a focus on embodiment and nature in vernacular literatures in England, Scotland, and Iceland. My work asks how literature captures premodern ideas of mutability to reimagine the opaque space where the body ends and relational environments begin. In particular, I am interested in how changeable bodies put pressure on premodern institutional perspectives of seemingly static and fixed forms of life. I regularly offer both undergraduate and graduate courses on medieval literary culture from the vantage points of premodern trans studies, gender and sexuality studies, critical disability studies, premodern critical race studies, history of science, and history of the body.
In my first book, Mercurial Natures: Chaucer’s Trans Poetics, I examine Chaucer’s reliance on bodily variation as a core instrument of his poetics. By the time Chaucer was writing, myriad thinkers – natural philosophers, theologians, encyclopedists, jurists, alchemists, surgeons, and moralists – spotlit gender variant figures as ciphers to reckon with ideas about the boundaries of the embodied self. Chaucer’s poetry responds to these contemporary discourses by testing just how permeable a body could be and spotlighting the edge cases of figures who resist interpretative capture. Pairing Chaucer’s poetry with literary texts by Gower and Wycliffe, as well as vernacular medical and scientific works by thinkers like Henry Daniel and Thomas Norton, this book considers the literary prehistory of sexological thought emergent in late medieval England. While the habits of thought available to medieval subjects for imagining the elasticity of gender and embodiment varied, Chaucer’s work invokes medicine, science, and labor to anatomize the body as open and porous yet still subject to interpretation and categorization. I offer readings of alternate techniques of bodily knowing among Chaucerian figures, such as the Wife of Bath’s planetary gender science or the Yeoman’s counterfeit poetics, that attempt, but often fail, to remain porous subjects. Essays that reflect the thinking in this book can be found here, here, and here. This project has been supported by the Institute of Advanced Study and the Boston University Center for the Humanities.
Medieval thought viewed the body as a porous system of exchange and my second project extends my work on bodily mutability in medieval literary ambient thought. I am interested in how ambient conditions like temperature and sound can offer new ways of understanding bodily change and relationality on sensory scales. As such, in this project I am interested in texts that contemplate the edges of the body through wildly different atmospheric moods, such as auditory organization in dream visions, encyclopedic information overload, and the slip between temperature and temperament in texts like The Book of Margery Kempe.
My work in premodern trans studies is part of an emergent and flourishing field of scholarship on trans topics before 1800. A major aspect of this field is the Early Modern Trans Studies conference, began by Colby Gordon and Simone Chess in 2021, which brings scholars working on early trans topics into conversation across disciplines. In 2025 I was honored to host the third iteration of this conference here at Boston University, which expanded on earlier EmoTrans conversations by inviting classicists, medievalists, and late antique scholars to bring premodern trans studies into conversation with early modern trans studies. Off-shoots of the big EMoTrans conference have generated workshop-style conferences such as “Early Modern Trans Sexualities” at University of Michigan in 2024 and a Folger Institute sponsored symposium on “Global Early Modern Trans Studies” in 2023. A brief history of the conference can be found here.
Right now, I am co-editing A Cultural History of Trans Lives, 300-1450 with J.D. Sargan under contract with Bloomsbury. I also currently serve on the Editorial Board for the journal postmedieval.
Books
- Mercurial Natures: Chaucer’s Trans Poetics (monograph, in preparation)
Selected Publications
- [In preparation] “Poetic Making and the Trans- Middle Ages,” in The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Sexuality in Late Medieval English Literature, ed. Holly Crocker. Co-authored with Gabrielle M.W. Bychowski.
- [Forthcoming] “A Monstrous Mirror: Trans/Crip Poetics in the Testament of Cresseid,” in The Oxford Handbook of Disability and Literatures in English, 700–1500, ed. Richard H. Godden, Tory Pearman, Leah Pope-Parker. (Expected 2027)
- “Philosophy and Science: Sexual Variance and Multiplicity,” in A Cultural History of Gender, 500-1400CE, eds. Susan Broomhall and Clare Davidson. (Bloomsbury Series, 2026): 13-35.
- “A Conversation on Trans Technique,” with Margaux Delaney, Micah Goodrich, Colby Gordon, Grace Lavery, Hil Malatino, Jeanne Vaccaro in postmedieval2 (2025): 679-702.
- “Medieval Intersex: Discourses and Discontents,” in The Companion to Sexuality in the Medieval West, eds. Jenny Bledsoe and Michelle Sauer. (Arc Humanities Press, 2025): 203-220.
- “An Herbal Triptych: Queer Intimacies and the Vegetal Middle Ages,” Diacritics2 (2024): 24-46, Co-Authored with Danielle Allor for the “Queer Environs” special issue edited by Austin Lillywhite and Nicole Seymour.
- “Trans Antagonisms and Affirmations in Henry Medwall’s Nature,” in Special Issue “Medieval Trans Natures” for Medieval Ecocriticisms 1 (2024): 117-138.
- “Trans Animacies and Premodern Alchemies,” in Medieval Mobilities: Gendered Bodies, Spaces, and Movements, eds. Jane Bonsall, Meagan Khoury, and Basil Arnould Price. The New Middle Ages Series. (Palgrave, 2023): 199-223.
- “The Yeoman’s Canon: On Toxic Mentors,” in the “Historicizing Consent” Colloquium, eds. Carissa Harris and Fiona Somerset, in Studies in the Age of Chaucer 44 (2022): 297-306.
- “Maimed Limbs and Biosalvation: Rehabilitation Politics in Piers Plowman,” in Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern, Anna Kłosowska, Greta LaFleur, and Masha Raskolnikov (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021): 353-395.
- “Medical Violence and ‘The Miracle of the Black Leg’,” in Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal, Oct. 8, 2020.
- “Ycrammed ful of cloutes and of bones: Chaucer’s Queer Cavities,” in Medieval Futurity: Essays for the Future of a Queer Medieval Studies, eds. Will Rogers and Christopher Michael Roman. New Queer Medievalisms Series (De Gruyter and Medieval Institute Publications, 2020): 153-179.
- “The Flyting of The Owl and the Nightingale: Animacy, Antisemitism, and Species Division,” Early Middle English1 (2020): 1-31.
- “Medieval Studies: The Stakes of the Field,” Editor’s Introduction to “Race, Revulsion, and Revolution in Medieval Studies,” postmedieval4 (2020): 356-370, co-authored with M. Breann Leake and Mary Rambaran-Olm.
- “Lolling and the Suspension of Salvation in Piers Plowman,” The Yearbook of Langland Studies 33 (2019): 13-42.
Honors, Grants, Awards
- 2026, Junior Faculty Fellow, Boston University Center for the Humanities
- 2026, Member, Institute of Advanced Study, School of Historical Studies, Princeton, NJ
- 2026, Special Commendation Award for “Trans Animacies and Premodern Alchemies” from Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship (SMFS)
- 2025, Article of the Month (December) on Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index for “An Herbal Triptych: Queer Intimacies and the Vegetal Middle Ages,” Diacritics2 (2024): 24-46, Co-Authored with Danielle Allor for the “Queer Environs” special issue edited by Austin Lillywhite and Nicole Seymour
- 2023, Special Commendation Award for “The Yeoman’s Canon: On Toxic Mentors” from Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship (SMFS)
- 2021, The 2020 Catherine Innes-Parker Memorial Prize for Early Middle English article “The Flyting of The Owl and the Nightingale: Animacy, Antisemitism, and Species Division”