Teaching Interests

I teach a wide range of literature, primarily in English, from the medieval through modern world. Although I specialize in earlier literature, my primary commitment as a teacher is to students’ education in literature and arts as a vital component of living in the modern world. My own scholarly research has delineated the connections between social practices, urban development, and aesthetic creation in Early Modern London. Through a wider set of texts and approaches in the classroom, I encourage students to think about what social and aesthetic practices can teach us about the way people process their world through the medium of literature. In learning the language of past texts, we are able to see the present with a different clarity, and by learning the skills of literary analysis, we can read our world with new sophistication and a healthy sense of historical perspective.  We also may better participate in the building of our society when we can develop a sense of cultural “play”: to rethink, remap, and rearticulate the questions of our lives in creative ways.

Selected Publications and Projects

“The Roaring Girl’s London Spaces,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 49.2 (Spring 2009): 417-436.

“Plague Space and Played Space in Urban Drama, 1604,” in Representing the Plague in Early Modern England. Eds. Rebecca Totaro and Ernest B. Gilman. Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture. New York: Routledge, June, 2010. 54-75.

Areas of Interest

Early Modern Literature, 16-17th centuries, especially drama

Theater History

Theories of Space and Urban Development

Theories of the Public and Private