Projects
A World of Words: Language, Earth and Embodiment in the Renaissance — Author
My current book project traces the earthly substrates of renaissance lexical culture. In its broadest strokes, the book examines period-specific ways of thinking about human sameness and difference that emerge when one attends to how language and linguistic identity are imaginatively linked not only to ethnicized and racialized human bodies, but also to a diversity of earthly matter. In it, I investigate how lexicographers, language instructors, antiquarians, chorographers, horticulturists, as well as dramatists and poets, variously conceived of the relationships between language, earth, and embodiment, ultimately developing a mode of thinking that I characterize as early modern "geo-linguistics."
Logomotives: Words that Change the World, 1400 -1700 — Co-Editor with Stephen Spiess
Bearing a wide range of linguistic, regional, and disciplinary expertise, the volume’s twenty-six contributors traverse multiple geographies (Asia, Africa, Iberian Peninsula, Europe, & the Americas), work across fifteen languages, and span from antiquity to our current moment. Contributors advance new developments in philologies of race, in queer-, feminist-, trans*-, transnational-, and postcolonial philologies to discover the world-transforming work performed by words and to curate new ways of thinking about the crosscurrents of words-, bodies-, affects-, and knowledges-in-motion.
The Renaissance of The Earth — Founding Director
The Renaissance of the Earth revolutionizes what it means to engage the early modern past with questions about our environmental future. Through a range of interdisciplinary research collaborations, undergraduate and graduate courses, hands-on workshops, conferences, and arts programming, it puts students, artists, and scholars at the center of an interdisciplinary research project with the goal of discovering diverse avenues for creating sustainable and equitable life. Crucially, we are committed to exploring those connections that present us with the most challenging legacies: extractive colonialism, racism, forced human migration, and the asymmetries of environmental devastation around the globe.
❦ https://www.renaissanceoftheearth.com/
The Anthropocene Lab — Research Team Member
At UMass Amherst, an interdisciplinary group of humanists, scientists, social scientists, and artists seek new interdisciplinary narratives about the Anthropocene in an effort to engage the deep past and shared futures, humans and non-human communities. The dynamics of the Anthropocene present fundamental challenges to traditional disciplinary silos and their capacity to understand systems and respond to crises. The way we imagine, speak or write about, or represent the Anthropocene are of critical importance at a time of climate change. What are, and how are, dominant narratives about the Anthropocene created? Which interdisciplinary practices and research agendas create better narratives?
Cross-campus “Thinking the Earth” seminars offer interested faculty and graduate students a platform to engage one of the most contested and noteworthy developments in intellectual history. ❦ https://blogs.umass.edu/anthropocenelab/
My research has been supported by:
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation | Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
The Connaught Fund | MassHumanities | Office of the Provost UMass Amherst
University of Toronto's Jackman Humanities Institute| University of Michigan's Institute for the Humanities
as well as the Huntington, Newberry, and Folger Shakespeare Libraries