Research Interests:
I’m interested in how people use the languages of feeling, loss, and disability to enforce or undermine ideas of racial difference and belonging.
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Journal Article: “‘Rub Him About The Temples’: Othello, Disability, and the Failures of Care” in Early Theatre 22.2 (December 2019)
This article explores how race and disability deconstruct and expose the facades of friendship. Reading Shakespeare’s Othello, it examines the networks of care surrounding the relationship between the titular character and Cassio. It demonstrates how, by revealing the many pretensions and failures of friendship, the play develops a theory and praxis for ethical care focused on the complexity of a black and disabled character.
Book Project: “Race and Melancholy in Early Modern Texts“
To what extent is grief constructed as a racial phenomenon, as a marker of either difference or belonging? This project examines the ways that writers in the early modern period use knowledge about melancholy to mark racial identification.
Dissertation: “Race and Melancholy in Early Modern English Literature”
The recurrence of melancholy as both a substance and a phenomenon in English literature of the 16th and 17th Centuries implicates writers like Shakespeare, Marlowe, Donne, and Behn as active in the emerging processes of racialization in the broader Atlantic world. Through analyses of melancholy in the drama, poetry, and prose of the above writers, I explore how racial consciousness develops through ideas about anger, unhappiness, devotion, and odor.