Areas of Interest:  

Early modern literature; rhetoric and poetics; metaphor; premodern theories of memory and knowledge formation; the history of reading

Dissertation Description:

My dissertation, “How to Do Things with Darkness: Poetry and Doubt in Early Modern England,” argues that the development of a conscious tradition of obscurity transformed scenes of reading and interpretation in sixteenth and seventeenth century poetry. The same poets who maintained that the aims of poetry were to teach, delight, and move nevertheless experimented with “dark conceits” and “dark sayings” in their own verse. Drawing on rhetorical, homiletic, and poetic manuals, “How to Do Things with Darkness” contends that an ethos of justified obscurity laid the groundwork not only for the cloudy allegories of Spenser and the metaphysical conceits of Donne but also for new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between reader and text. Why would you write darkly, if you wanted to teach? And how should you read dark writing, if you want to understand?

Peer-Reviewed Articles:

“John Donne’s Dark Teachings.” Modern Philology 122, no. 2 (November 2024): 243-62.

“A New Letter from Byron to Count Alborghetti.” The Byron Journal 49, no. 2 (December 2021): 159-64.