Impassioned by the sonnet form, I am a poet, translator, and Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, French and Francophone Studies, and Hispanic Studies at Brown University, where I enjoy teaching courses on critical theory and on medieval and early modern literature. I am officially affiliated with the Department of Italian Studies, Medieval Studies, the Center for the Study of the Early Modern World, the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, and the Center for Global Antiquity, and I am one of Brown’s Faculty Consortium and Executive Committee Representatives to the Folger Shakespeare Library.

I co-convene Brown’s Disability Studies Working Group, and I co-chair the Renaissance Studies Seminar at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center. I am on the Executive Committee of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association, and I am one of the Co-editors-in-Chief of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, and I am a dedicated reader of all genres of Petrarch’s work, from his Latin epic and invectives to the lyric poetry featured here.

My research focuses on gender, race, and disability in premodern literature. In my teaching and writing, I give close attention to epic and lyric poetry, especially on the Petrarchan oeuvre and the early origins of the love lyric, Petrarchism, and Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso. I also tend to prioritize medieval and early modern drama, particularly around the issues of marriage, health, disability, and race in early modern tragedy. I enjoy studying exemplarity and classical intertexts as they resonate during the medieval and early modern periods, and I dedicate a good deal of time to premodern women’s writing and the (proto)feminist complaint tradition.

On Petrarch, I try to give equal attention to his brilliant Latin works and the watershed moment(s) that his lyric poetry represents. His work is a cornerstone of my forthcoming book on autobiographical discussions of premodern disability. Of late, I have been especially excited by his representation of the natural world, which I have been reading through an ecocritical lens; his portrayal of medicine and the physical symptomology of lovesickness; and his construction of an authorial voice and the citational and intertextual practices he uses to do so, alongside those of premodern women authors and Petrarchan poets. I have also recently written on wounds and the archive in Petrarch’s letters and poetry and on the representation of race in his epic and lyric poetry.

Stay tuned, and thanks so much for your interest!