My research and teaching considers how questions of style converge with questions of epistemology in Renaissance poetry and poetics as well as literary criticism at large.
My first book Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics was published by Fordham University Press in 2018 and my essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from venues like Critical Inquiry, PMLA, ELH, Modern Philology, and English Literary Renaissance.
I teach courses on the method of close reading in the verbal and visual arts, on the converging practices of Renaissance and contemporary poets, on genres like romance, and on single poems, like Ovid’s Metamophoses or Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. I am a co-organizer of the Renaissance Literature Seminar of the USC-Huntington EMSI which you can learn more about [here] and I am a co-founder and organizer of The Renaissance Project which you can learn more about [here].
I am currently serving as the Interim Director of College Writing which you can learn more about [here].
About Seeing Things Otherwise: On Form and Variation in Shakespeare and Picasso:
Seeing Things Otherwise is a book about method in literary criticism. Interweaving ekphrastic studies of Picasso’s 1957 series, Las Meninas (after Velázquez), with readings of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609), I argue that the practice of formal variation offers contemporary critics a method of reading, writing, and thinking about poetry that crosses the traditional division between ‘creative’ and ‘critical’ writing. From the anamorphic perspective afforded by Picasso’s paintings, Shakespeare’s most distinctive aesthetic feature in the Sonnets—traditionally described as his “vagueness,” or “uncertainty,” or “ambiguity”—snaps into focus as the sonnets’ capacity to shelter their own variations. With chapters on the epistemology of supposition, translation across forms, feminist poetics of revision, and the syntax of service, Seeing Things Otherwise is a vital critical resource for scholars interested in ‘fiction’ broadly conceived as a category of knowledge dedicated to “what may be.”
About Indecorous Thinking:
Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics is a study of artifice at its most conspicuous: it argues that early modern writers turned to figures of speech like simile, antithesis, and periphrasis as the instruments of a particular kind of thinking increasingly aligned with the emergent field of vernacular poesie. The classical ideal of decorum described the absence of visible art as a crucial precondition for the rhetorical act of persuasion, the regulation of civilized communities, and the achievement of beauty. To speak well in early modern England, one spoke as if off-the-cuff. In readings of three major poets—Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Mary Wroth—I argue that one of early modern literature’s richest contributions to the history of poetics is the idea that open art—artifice that rings out with the bells and whistles of ornamentation—celebrates the craft of poetry even as it also expands the range of activities we tend to attribute to poetry. Against the imperatives of sprezzatura and celare artem, artifice at its most conspicuous asserts the value of a poetic process that does not conceal either the time or the labor of its making.
