My research and teaching focus on early modern poetry, drama, music, and pageantry, as well as media studies, trans studies, and performance theory.
My current monograph project, Trans Child Performance in the Time of Shakespeare, asks why charismatic child performers associated with gender plasticity held such magnetic appeal during the early modern period. I argue that child performance presented opportunities to imagine, define, circumscribe, and (in most cases) eradicate alternatives to compulsory gender differentiation. Gender variance was framed as something to be mastered, to discipline, and to grow out of—treated with condescension and even benevolence because it could be safely consigned to a temporary or liminal state. English performance culture participated in the construction of childhood less as a stage of life from which one automatically graduated than as a conditional status of subjection that could be indefinitely extended and imposed. Childhood emerged as a nimble and elastic means of consolidating patriarchal, heteronormative, racialized, and gerontocratic prerogatives, such that transness, like childhood itself, could be evacuated of self-determination and political agency.
My first book, Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England, studies the role of vocal music in the poetic and theatrical cultures of the English Renaissance. Virtuosic actor-singers redefined the theatrical culture of William Shakespeare and his peers. Composers including William Byrd and Henry Lawes shaped the transmission of Renaissance lyric verse. Poets from Philip Sidney to John Milton were fascinated by the disorienting influx of musical performance into their works. Musical performance was a driving force behind the period’s theatrical and poetic movements, yet its importance to literary history has long been ignored or effaced. Unwritten Poetry outlines a new approach to Renaissance poetry and drama that is grounded not simply in performance history or book history but in a more synthetic media history.
The introduction to Unwritten Poetry is freely available here. You can find reviews here:
I have additional research interests in performance studies, trans studies, media studies, civic pageantry, musicology, media studies, and the digital humanities. I am collaborating with Katherine Larson (English, University of Toronto) and Sarah Williams (Music History, University of South Carolina) on Early Modern Songscapes, an interdisciplinary web project on the musical performance of English Renaissance poetry. My work has been published in PMLA, Renaissance Studies, Shakespeare Quarterly, Studies in Philology, the Map of Early Modern London, and edited collections. Click here to view my publications and here for a list of recent and upcoming presentations.
My research in media studies plays out in my teaching, where I ask students to draw connections between the early modern mediascape and our own historical moment. My teaching also places an emphasis on creative adaptation and performance, both at the University of Maryland and in my work with incarcerated students as an instructor in the Goucher Prison Education Partnership and the Georgetown Prisons and Justice Initiative.
Beyond Earwitnesses: Thomas Dekker's Soundwriting
Out this month is an edited collection called Literature as Sound Studies that features my foray into the dramatic and literary soundworld of Thomas Dekker's plays, pamphlets, and poems. Edited by Liesl Yamaguchi and yasser elhariry, the collection offers new ways of understanding the richness, complexity, and surprise that literature can bring to the trans-disciplinary endeavor of sound studies--with essays on topics ranging from early modern English drama to twentieth-century Moroccan poetry. My contribution is an overview of Dekker's unusually sensitive acoustic imagination, which creates classed and gendered sounds and voices otherwise unheard. Dekker’s playbooks parody iambic pentameter precedents and channel the acoustic environment of the playhouse to fashion a new, charismatic mode of comedic bluster in prose. His pamphlets voice classed subjection and (at the same time) exuberance, using the medium of print to invite and disseminate performative events. In this way, Dekker’s oeuvre shows how versatile literary texts can be vital resources in sound studies, acting as generative scripts for new acoustic possibilities.
I'm honored to say that Unwritten Poetry has won the 2020 Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature. The prize is one of four awarded yearly by the Sixteenth Century Society & Conference for the best books written in English dealing with four categories within the time frame of 1450–1660: Art and Music History, History and Theology, Literature, and Reference Works. Here is what the prize committee said about the book:
"Unwritten Poetry makes a sophisticated argument about early modern song as an ongoing conversation that takes place between the material source, or record, of a musical performance of a literary or poetic text, either in manuscript or print, and the evanescence of songs as they are performed, which are themselves grounded in a lived and collaborative community of performers, or in the physical body, with all its vulnerabilities, of the performer. Its methodology is impressively capacious and multifaceted, moving between contemporary media theory, history of the book as well as music history, and close readings of individual texts. It displays a close attentiveness to the lived physical realities of the human body, in all of its frailties, limitations, and challenges, while, at the same time, remaining sensitive to and aware of the realm of the spirit, to musical harmony, to which song reaches. This book offers a powerful and original rethinking of early modern poetic and dramatic culture as a movement between and among the material text, the performer’s body, and the 'unwritten and reimagined' realm of song."
image from "Dance of Putti," Flemish, late sixteenth century, circle of of Otto Van Veen