Research
I have published widely on the literature and culture of early modern England. I am the author of Emotion in the Tudor Court: Literature, Emotion, and Early Modern Feeling (2018), Shakespeare and Disgust: The History and Science of Early Modern Revulsion (2023), The Universality of Emotion: Perspectives from the Sciences and Humanities (2024), The Rivalrous Renaissance: Envy and Jealousy in Early Modern English Literature (2025), Literary Neurodiversity Studies: Current and Future Directions (2025), and the co-editor of Positive Emotions in Early Modern Literature and Culture (2021) and The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion (2022); I have several other book-length projects under contract (see below). My articles have appeared in journals such as Renaissance Quarterly, ELH, Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare, Review of English Studies, Modern Philology, Studies in Philology, Renaissance Drama, English Literary Renaissance, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, and Huntington Library Quarterly, among others. For a full list of my publications, click here.
My primary research focus has been the literary and cultural history of emotion. In my work, I employ traditional historicist methods of research, but I also ground my understanding of emotion in work from the affective sciences.
Since 2023, I have served as co-Editor-in-Chief of the interdisciplinary journal Emotion Review.
My current research is anchored in the developing subfield of
early modern neurodiversity studies. I talk about this work on the Neurodiversity page of this site. I also created literaryneurodiversity.org.
My latest book is called Literary Neurodiversity Studies: Current and Future Directions. This book is a concise but comprehensive introduction to the field of literary neurodiversity studies, a growing approach to literary criticism that has emerged in the past decade. Its three parts are designed to 1) introduce readers both to the general concept of neurodiversity and to current outlooks, approaches, and key scholarship from literary neurodiversity studies; 2) to present one possible vision of the future of literary neurodiversity studies, by offering an argument about how the field might further entwine with more general research on literary cognition, literary emotion, and literary sensation ; and 3) to model for readers how one might perform a neurological reading of a literary text, by offering a sustained analysis of Shakespeare’s Othello. It also contains an extensive bibliography of existing scholarship from literary neurodiversity studies.
My fourth book is The Universality of Emotion: Perspectives from the Sciences and Humanities (Cambridge, 2025). Unlike the rest of my work, this project isn't about early modern England: instead, it surveys how a number of major disciplines – psychology, neuroscience, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, history, linguistics, and literary/cultural studies – have
addressed the long-standing research question of whether human emotions should be thought of as meaningfully “universal.” The book presents both the universalist and anti-universalist positions, and concludes by considering attempts to move beyond this increasingly unhelpful binary.
My third book, The Rivalrous Renaissance: Envy and Jealousy in Early Modern English Literature (Routledge, 2025), is the first full-length study of envy and jealousy in Renaissance England. The book introduces readers both to the cultural dynamics of affective rivalry in the period and to how these crucial feelings inspired literary works across a wide range of genres, by luminary authors such as Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Mary Wroth, William Shakespeare, and John Milton. Early modern concepts of envy and jealousy were more actively theorized as central components of human experience than is typical today; I argue that literature is the key domain where this Renaissance theorization of affective rivalry was brought to life. Poetry, drama, and narrative prose created the conditions for these concepts to become most socially meaningful, simulating the interpersonal experiences in which the emotions practically manifest.
My first book, Emotion in the Tudor Court: Literature, History, and Early Modern Feeling (Northwestern, 2018) examines how literature both reflects and constructs the emotional dynamics of life in the Renaissance court. In it, I argue that emotionality is a foundational framework through which historical subjects embody and engage their world, and thus can serve as a fundamental lens of social and textual analysis.
Spanning the sixteenth century, the book explores Cardinal Thomas Wolsey and Henrician satire; Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and elegy; Sir Philip Sidney and Elizabethan pageantry; and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, and factional literature. It demonstrates how the dynamics of disgust, envy, rejection, and dread, as they are understood in the modern affective sciences, can be seen to guide literary production in the early modern court.
The book is open-access, so you can download a copy by clicking this link.
My second book, Shakespeare and Disgust: The History and Science of Early Modern Revulsion (Bloomsbury, 2023) argues that the experience of revulsion is one of Shakespeare's central dramatic concerns. Known as the gatekeeper emotion, disgust is the affective process through which humans protect the boundaries of their physical bodies from material contaminants and their social bodies from moral contaminants. Accordingly, the emotion provided Shakespeare with a master category of compositional tools – poetic images, thematic considerations, and narrative possibilities – to interrogate the violation and preservation of such boundaries, whether in the form of compromised bodies, compromised moral actors or compromised social orders.
Designed to offer both focused readings and birds-eye coverage, this volume alternates between chapters devoted to the sustained analysis of revulsion in specific plays (Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Othello, and Hamlet) and chapters presenting a general overview of Shakespeare's engagement with certain kinds of prototypical disgust elicitors, including food, disease, bodily violation, race, and sex disgust.
I co-edited the essay collection Positive Emotions in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Manchester, 2021). This volume includes essays that reframe historical understandings of emotional life in the Renaissance, focusing on under-studied feelings such as mirth, solidarity, and tranquillity.
Methodologically diverse and interdisciplinary, these chapters draw from the history of emotions, affect theory and the contemporary social and cognitive sciences to reveal rich and sustained cultural attention in the early modern period to these positive feelings.
I also co-edited the essay The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion (Routledge, 2022). Combining scientific and literary elements, this book provides a theoretical and topical introduction to the field of literature and emotion.
Looking at a variety of formats, including novels, drama, film, graphic fiction, and lyric poetry, the book also includes focus on specific authors such as Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and Viet Thanh Nguyen. The volume introduces the theoretical groundwork, covering such categories as affect theory, affective neuroscience, cognitive science, evolution, and history of emotions. It examines the range of emotions that play a special role in literature, including happiness, fear, aesthetic delight, empathy, and sympathy, as well as aspects of literature (style, narrative voice, and others) that bear on emotional response. Finally, it explores ethical and political concerns that are often intertwined with emotional response, including racism, colonialism, disability, ecology, gender, sexuality, and trauma.
I also have several other books in progress:
Historical Neurodiversity Studies: A New Paradigm
(Cambridge, expected 2025), puts forth a new theoretical vision for the history of human neurodiversity, uniting scholarship on the history cognition, emotion, and sensation under a single conceptual paradigm.
Shakespeare and Emotion and Affect Theory (Bloomsbury, expected 2026) is a part of The Arden Shakespeare's Shakespeare and Theory series; it will introduce readers to how Shakespeareans engage with the topics of emotion and affect.
Early Modern Theories of Emotion: A Guide to Printed Sources and Elite English Thought (Bloomsbury, expected 2027) is a guidebook to theories of emotion published in English from 1500-1700. It will be a printed supplement to my Sources of Early Modern Emotion in English, 1500-1700 project.