About

I’m scholar on the road: born and raised in southwest Louisiana, I studied in South Bend, IN, and then went on to be a professor first in Istanbul, then in British Columbia, and now in Norfolk, Virginia.

Though an early modernist by training, I’d prefer to call myself a humanist, in the best and most inclusive senses of the term. My writing and teaching find me thinking often about literature and philosophy of all kinds, and more narrowly about the reception of classical antiquity and myth, early modern religion and politics, and the history of horror.

In this vein, I am working on two book projects. The first, more or less complete, is “The Aesthetics of Majesty in Early Modern England.” This book, the first of its kind, recovers “majesty” as a distinct language of political theology, and one that is different from sovereignty in being an explicitly aesthetic regime. At the heart of this regime in its classic form is the “scene of majesty”: the moment in which a ruler or person in authority overawes the subject, making them see, taste, and feel their subordination, and demonstrating what Claudius in Hamlet calls “the divinity that doth hedge a king.” Such scenes were played and replayed throughout early modern England. My argument, however, is that major poets in the period (including Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Milton) made majesty strange, reimagining and remixing such scenes in order to figure forth new and different ideas of community and the relations between sovereigns and subjects.

My second book project, on “Early Modern Horror,” asks how we might theorize horror’s specifically early modern forms and philosophical underpinnings. If modern horror from the gothic on tends to be a horror of what is beyond or against thought–a horror that gives form to formlessness–then early modern horror as it appears in writers such as Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Middleton is a horror of form itself, and in the explicability of a reality determined from eternity. Early work on this subject can be found in my article on The Revenger’s Tragedy, forthcoming in English Literary History.