Research Description

My research focusses on the literature and culture of early-modern England, particularly of the sixteenth century. i have published extensively on the poetry of Edmund Spenser.

My current book-project, tentatively entitled "'Gentle Noriture and Vertuous Lore': Early-Modern English Literature and Pedagogical Culture," examines the tensions between humanist education, with its arts of citizenship, and familial instruction. Such a study can tell us a lot about the sometimes overlapping, sometimes conflicting pressures shaping the individual in a period when both "nation" and "family" are starting to assume the forms still familiar to us today. I am especially interested in the role of emotion and the functions of memory within these two instructional regimens. My project draws on such primary sources as educational treatises, letters, wills, published letters of advice from fathers to sons, and commonplace books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This material furnishes a new context within which to study signal literary works by Spenser, Shakespeare, Sir Walter Ralegh, and Sir Philip Sidney.

Teaching Description

I teach at all levels, from first-year to graduate. At the upper levels, I specialize in courses on the literature and culture of the sixteenth and early-seventeenth. I regularly teach a 2000-level survey course on the literature of the sixteenth century; I have taught Shakespeare many times. I have developed Special Studies, Honours, and Graduate courses on such topics as: monsters, myths, and magic in early-modern literature; court, country, and city in sixteenth-century England; Spenser and Ireland.