English and Comparative Literature

In this dissertation on contemporary U.S. literature, I situate the poetry of Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, and Ed Roberson within post-1968 leftist projects that share a common liberatory impulse. I mark the period of cultural production over the past fifty years by the term "post-1968" in order to evoke the popular imagination of "the sixties" as a time of revolutionary action that came to both real and imagined conclusions in 1968 in the U.S., France, China, Mexico, and elsewhere. In response, I argue, post-1968 writers developed a poetics based in cautiousness, wary of the double-edged danger of the tools we deploy toward social transformation. I insist that by doing so, their move from direct action to study represents a continuation rather than a departure from the liberatory projects that precede (and succeed) them, even as their political-aesthetic strategies shift from the certainty of resolute political visions toward the uncertainty of a politics of pl...

In his Anatomy of Plants (1682), Royal Society Fellow Nehemiah Grew writes: ‘So that a Plant is, as it were, an Animal in Quires; as an Animal is a Plant, or rather several Plants bound up into one Volume.’ Zooming in on the circuit of metaphors packed into this sentence, this essay explores: (a) how medieval zoophytes – marvels like the vegetable lamb and the barnacle goose tree – spurred early modern experiments in comparative anatomy (‘a Plant is, as it were, an Animal … as an Animal is a Plant’), and (b) how bibliographic tropes came to mediate these plant–animal comparisons (‘an Animal in Quires … or rather several Plants bound up into one Volume’). As I argue, not only the affordances of print culture but the book as a material object gave structure to the study of life in the seventeenth century, transforming the medieval ‘book of nature’ device into an actual printed book.

As early efforts to include women in the canon of Renaissance literature give way to gender-oriented research in material culture and book history, it is increasingly the scholar's task to marry the language of ideological negotiation to a more wide-ranging investigation into the many ways that women of all social ranks contributed to the making, weaving, writing, printing, etching, annotating, composing, and publishing of English literary culture. This essay takes a fresh look at the authorship of Isabella Whitney, the earliest identified woman to publish secular English verse in print. Specifically, Whitney restructures humanist notions of reading-as-gathering around “huswifely” textile work by drawing on the rich semantic context of the word slip. Situating Whitney's A Sweet Nosgay in the material culture from which she drew her metaphors illuminates its relationship to a range of Elizabethan verse miscellanies and demonstrates her innovation within the genre as a woman.

Summary of Course Evaluations | English 150, Literary and Scientific Methods, Wake Forest University, Spring 2013 |  English 123, Detectives and Detection, University of North Carolina, Fall 2010 | Final semester at both UNC and Wake Forest (until my return to Wake in 2015)