Research interests
I have studied and written about authors from the Early Modern period through Modernism in England, Italy, Germany, Austria, and France (authors such as Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Mary Shelley, Alcott, Joyce; Dante, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Nogorola, Colonna, Tasso, Svevo, Calvino; Grimmelshausen, Goethe, Döblin, Hartwig, Kraus, Roth, Musil; Rabelais, Montaigne, Molière, Balzac, Zola, Proust). My research and teaching focus on translation theory, critical disability studies, genre theory (especially narrative and the essay), self-writing, and trauma theory.
My dissertation — Witness to Collapse: Early Modern and Modernist Fictions — argued that considering the works of Grimmelshausen, Musil, Ariosto, and Svevo, and examining how they respond to structural collapses in their respective socio-historical contexts reveals how long narrative form in both the Early Modern and Modernist periods can be understood as an act of bearing witness. These authors’ texts process the impact of major historical events (most notably nation-destroying religious and political schisms), allowing literature to emerge as a form of self-soothing for the authors and their readership. This approach allows for a deeper understanding of how literature contributes to the process of rebuilding morale and communal identity after traumas such as religious breaks, political realignments, and wars. In the face of lost identifiers — whether as members of a dominant religion, a powerful empire, or an influential social group — authors, as potential embodied signifiers for the citizens of their homes, work with long narrative form to reclaim a sense of control.
Conference presentations
“Collapse and Catastrophe: Narrative Form as Trauma Response,” Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, San Francisco, February 2026
“Sins of the Father, Sons of the Empire: Joseph Roth’s Die Kapuzinergruft,” German Studies Association Annual Meeting, Arlington, VA, September 2025
“Diagnostic Self-Fashioning: Writing the Self Through Disability,” American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, May 2025
“Raising Monsters: William Godwin, Mary Shelley, and the Creation of Chaos,” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Annual Meeting, April 2025
“Writing the Self: Teresa of Avila, Michel de Montaigne, and Renaissance Autobiography,” Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, Boston, March 2025
“In Search of a Hometown: Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, and the Myth of Stability in Early Modern Italy,” Modern Language Association Annual Convention, New Orleans, January 2025
“In the Shadow of War: Self-Representation and Trauma Processing in Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus,” German Studies Association Annual Meeting, Atlanta, September 2024
“Viennese Gartenkultur and its Biblical Descendants: Echoes of Eden in Robert Musil’s Vienna,” American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, Montreal, March 2024
“‘Was She Thy God?’: Desire as Idolatry in Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes,” 13th Annual International Milton Symposium, Toronto, July 2023
“Lacking ‘Necessary Competence’: Disability and Diagnostic Self-Fashioning in Montaigne and Milton,” Equinoxes 2023: Corporeal Conversations Conference, Brown University, March 2023
“Variations on Translation: Reading, Performing, and Empathizing with Shakespeare,” Yale British Studies Colloquium, Fall 2021
“Modes of Vulnerability: William Godwin’s Emotional Register,” Yale British Studies Colloquium, Fall 2020
Publications
Book review:
“Book Review: Das Leben: Deutsch als Fremdsprache A1” in Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German, 57, 1 (October 2023): 135– 137. https://doi.org/10.1111/tger.12261
Articles:
“Echoes of Eden in Musil’s Vienna: Literature and the Culture of the Garden” (forthcoming 2026 pending full-issue peer review for a special issue of Religion and Literature on Modernism, Religion, and Empire)
“Diagnostic Self-Fashioning: Writing the Self Through Disability” (invited submission, under review for a special issue of Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture, and Social Justice on Disability, Divergence, and Creative Expression)
“Sins of the Father, Sons of the Empire: Paternal Abandonment and Traumatic Loss in Modernist Vienna” (under review)
“‘Was She Thy God?’: Marital and Sexual Desire as Idolatry in Milton’s Epic Poems” (under review)
“Distress Signals: Examining Undulation in the Diaries of William Godwin and the Art of Agnes Martin” (under review)
“Dante and the Politics of (Self-) Translation” (under review)
Articles in progress:
“Writing the Self: Teresa of Avila, Michel de Montaigne, and Renaissance Autobiography”
