Biography
I currently serve as Lecturer in English Literature, teaching courses on Shakespeare, early modern literature, and postcolonial fiction and film. Before joining Edinburgh Napier in 2021, I was lecturer in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at Queen’s University, Belfast, having taught previously at the University of Nottingham and the Shakespeare Institute.
My primary research focusses upon two interrelated strands: massacres on the early modern stage, and intersections between Shakespeare and global atrocities from the Holocaust to 9/11. Together, these projects challenge the pervasive assumption that extreme violence is senseless by exposing the ways that early modern drama and its later adaptation reveals and constructs meanings in atrocity.
In addition to articles in Early Theatre and the Journal of the British Academy, my forthcoming monograph – Massacres in Early Modern Drama – is under contract with Manchester University Press for the Revels Plays Companion Library Series. The first full-length study of the conceptualization and enactment of massacres in early modern drama, the book challenges a common orthodoxy – that massacres are senseless in feeling and reason – by drawing rich, complex, and competing meanings of massacres on the early modern stage. In 2021, I was awarded a fellowship by the Folger Shakespeare Library to bring this project to its conclusion.
As I bring Massacres in Early Modern Drama to a close, I am turning my attention to two interconnected book projects. The first, an edited collection entitled Atrocity and Early Modern Drama with Sarah E. Johnson (Royal Military College, Canada), will bring together papers originating from seminars I co/led for the International Shakespeare Conference and the Shakespeare Association of America. The volume, which is under contract with Bloomsbury for the Arden Early Modern Drama Series, will give the first wide-ranging account of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century typologies of atrocity as they emerge in English drama, engagements with atrocity in contemporary Shakespeare performance, and pedagogical approaches to early modern atrocity in the twenty-first-century classroom.
This work will prime my second monograph, Shakespeare and Atrocity: The Holocaust to 9/11. This book will examine Shakespearean intersections with atrocities between two era-defining events that inaugurated new grammars, technologies, and legacies for extreme violence. I will analyse multiple constituencies (victims, survivors, perpetrators, writers, theatre and film makers) from across the globe who use Shakespeare to justify or cope with atrocities during their perpetration and those who employ Shakespeare retrospectively to reflect upon acts of atrocity. I seek to expand our understanding of how some of the world’s most infamous atrocities and the world’s most famous playwright are mutually implicated.
I currently serve on the editorial team of Early Theatre as book reviews editor. I am a member of the British Shakespeare Association, the Shakespeare Association of America, the Society for Renaissance Studies, and the Marlowe Society of America.