Current Book Projects
My current book projects investigate how language shapes our worlds and how the practices through which we study it might themselves be transformed. From dictionaries that define and unsettle human difference, to words that catalyze historical change, to annotations that proliferate the possibilities of reading, my work approaches philology as both a rigorous historical practice and an open-ended experiment in making knowledge.
How do linguistic practices make and unsettle categories of knowledge and human difference?
My current book project, Undefined: Speculative Lexicography in a World of Words, explores the catalytic role of dictionaries in forging premodern epistemologies of ethnic, racial, gendered, and sexed embodiment. I approach poly-, bi-, and monolingual dictionaries not simply as repositories of linguistic knowledge but as engines of epistemological inquiry: sites where lexicographers tested how words might make sense of the world and its inhabitants. Through a cultivated capacity for speculation, lexicography became an un/defining technology—one that unsettled the stability of definition even as it generated new possibilities for imagining and debating human sameness and difference. Undefined asks what happens when we understand the dictionary not as a machine for settling meaning, but as a technology for opening it up.
How do words move through the world and catalyze historical change?
My interest in the world-making force of language animates Logomotives: Words that Change the World, 1400–1700, which I co-edited with Stephen Spiess. Bringing together twenty-five contributors working across fifteen languages and multiple geographies, the volume explores how words, bodies, affects, and knowledges move across cultural and historical contexts. Its diverse approaches to race, queer, feminist, trans*, transnational, and postcolonial philologies illuminate the transformative work words perform while opening new possibilities for thinking across linguistic, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries.
How might early modern trans studies reinvent the practices through which texts are interpreted, edited, and authorized?
With Sawyer Kemp and Simone Chess, I am also developing ROAR!: An Unauthorized Critical Addition, a collaborative editing experiment that brings twenty-five glossators into conversation with Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s The Roaring Girl (1611). Rather than replacing the traditional edition, ROAR! multiplies the possibilities of annotation through glosses, digressions, critiques, and provocations. Drawing on queer, trans, feminist, and disability methods, the project makes annotation itself a site of critical and creative possibility, challenging the reproduction of editorial authority while cultivating an ethics of addition, interpretive elasticity, and diverse expertise.
Research Leadership
Through my leadership of the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies and the founding of Renaissance of the Earth, I cultivate the conditions for dynamic encounters among the humanities, sciences, arts, and public life—where disciplines cross-pollinate, new questions take root, and historical inquiry opens onto shared possibilities for the future.
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/
Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies - Director
The Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies advances research in the early modern humanities by cultivating cultures of collaboration. Our mission is to develop multicultural, diverse, and timely programming that fosters the best of interdisciplinary engagement in the humanities and forecasts its future course. We do so by generating and fostering creative and educational public-facing programming that invites students and the public to explore the legacies of early modern literature, history, science, cultural, and artistic production in our world today and to mobilize this knowledge to shape more just and livable futures.
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