Biography
I am currently a Postdoc Mobility Fellow in the Faculty of English and Junior Research Fellow at St Hilda's College, where I am working on my second book Climate Fictions Before Climate Change: A Literary History, 1500–1800. I received my PhD in English Literature from the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) in 2025.
My current research project explores how early modern English literature articulates ideas about the climate. In the scholarship on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, the environment has become an increasingly important area of study. The book project identifies a significant gap: because the term 'climate' is not consistently used in the early modern period, it has not functioned as a central critical term or site of inquiry in recent work on early modern literature and the environment. This lack, however, is merely terminological and not substantial: early modern literature emphasizes over and over how the climate affects human lives and activities – only in its own terms. I propose that early modern literature can offer us a new and provocative context to think about urgent questions of the present. Focusing on how early modern texts imagine control over the climate, my research establishes a historical frame of reference for current fantasies of 'fixing' climate change via technological means, such as carbon capture and geo-engineering.
I have published on the role of plot in Shakespeare source study (in Shakespeare Survey), intention in sixteenth-century translation theory (in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies), and performance as an interpretive category in genre theory (in the edited volume Closet Drama in Early Modern England).
In 2025, I was selected to present my practical research on an early modern stage technology for the representation of bloodshed (employing a pig's bladder and vinegar) as part of the prestigious Next Generation Plenary (NextGenPlen) panel at the Shakespeare Association of America's annual meeting.
Positions
- Junior Research Fellow in English
Subjects
- English
