RESEARCH

My current project, Theater in Pieces: The “Elizabethan” Avant-Garde, examines the afterlives of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the long twentieth-century avant-garde. It argues that the rise of theatrical modernism was closely tied to the Parisian revival of the “dark Elizabethans,” which played a decisive role in shaping avant-garde attitudes and ideas. More broadly, I am interested in how texts, performances, and their material contexts work together to produce cultural meanings.

In a recent article in Shakespeare Yearbook, I explore how Julie Taymor employs the iconography of dismemberment in Titus Andronicus to consider the effects of new media on contemporary audiences. My essay on the spatialization of bodies and power in Kafka’s The Trial appeared in the Journal of the Kafka Society of America. I also engage with questions of sexuality, cultural identity, and gender in early modern literature. For example, my article on Sidney’s Old Arcadia, which received the Renaissance Essay Prize from Literature Compass, examines how female characters use writing as a self-conscious strategy to negotiate authorial identity within a male-dominated print culture. Another essay, published in Prose Studies, analyzes how Thomas More’s Utopia explores the influence of print conventions on Renaissance historical discourse and fictional representation.