Book Project
I am writing a book titled Gendered Seascapes and Monarchy in Early Modern English Culture, which explores seascapes, including figures of coastlines, ships and wrecks, naval war, and stormy seas, that writers across centuries have used to propose systems of authority and to warn readers about threats to governing structures. I argue that early modern seascapes often posit a hierarchical, gendered relationship between pilot and ship or human and environment; for example, the ideal monarch is like a pilot who controls the ship-like state or the ideal husband pilots his ship-like wife. Yet queer figures and models of human-nonhuman collaboration—such as male bodies compared to pregnant sails or a monarch who is a pilot and also a wind, an island, or a harbor—disrupt top-down, patriarchal systems of governance.
The book analyzes seascapes that appear in a range of well- and lesser-known plays, poems, ballads, narrative fictions, sermons, and pamphlets from 1580-1680, including Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies. Each chapter discusses critical questions that arise from the focus of the figures under examination, beginning with the girdling sea, and moving to figures of pregnant sails, golden rigging, and raging waters; writers use these figures to theorize social and political authority, seeking to justify a naturally or divinely given power to police borders, to colonize, to enrich the state, and to enact violence. Seascapes reveal—in more and less explicit ways—that authority is constructed and not natural, based on fantasies of control, and ultimately unjustifiable. Seascapes show us just how hard early modern English writers—and perhaps their readers, too—were working to proclaim hierarchy as natural. Seascapes make plain that hard work and the fantasy of control and domination it seeks to uphold. My project addresses a gap in blue humanities scholarship, illustrating how a focus on gender and texts written by women provides new perspectives on early modern wetscapes.
Image courtesy of The Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary, Columbia University Libraries.
From Life of Guthlac British Library ms Harley Roll Y 6
Publications
In Process
“Fountain, Shipwreck, Quagmire: Watery Bodies in Early Modern English Culture.” Invited volume for the Cambridge Element series Women, Gender and Sexuality in Premodern Literature and Culture edited by Danielle Clarke and Michelle M. Sauer. Manuscript in preparation.
“Adapting Pirates and Captives.” Practical Pedagogy. Eds. Jess Hamlet, Eileen Sperry, and Courney Parker. Bloomsbury Press. Invited contribution; in revision.
“‘I am the sea’: Grief and Disability in Titus Andronicus.” Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and the Natural World. Eds. Todd Borlik and Karen Raber. Oxford University Press. Invited contribution; in peer review.
2025
Review: Mary C. Fuller. Lines Drawn Across the Globe: Reading Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (McGill-Queens UP, 2023). Journal of British Studies, 64: e96.
2024
“Estuarial Rage and Resistance in Hester Pulter’s ‘The Complaint of Thames.’” Water and Cognition in Early Modern English Literature. Eds. Nic Helms and Steve Mentz. Amsterdam University Press. 237-55.
Review: Todd Andrew Borlik. Shakespeare Beyond the Green World: Drama and Ecopolitics in Jacobean Britain (Oxford UP, 2023). ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 31.1. 237-238.
2023
“Rivers and Bogs: Slow Protests in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko.” Coastal Studies & Society 2.1 (March 2023): 38-57. Invited contribution for a special issue edited by Christopher Pastore.
- Co-Winner of the Best Article Award 2023 from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender.
2022
“Europa into the Waves: John Dee and Meandering Research.” The Collation. Folger Shakespeare Library. 8 July.
2021
“Conflicts: Naval Wars, Violent Migrations, and Silent/Silenced Archives.” A Cultural History of the Sea in the Early Modern Age. Ed. Steve Mentz. Bloomsbury Publishing. 105-33.
2020
“Dark Holes and Violent Allegories in The Faerie Queene.” Spenser Review 50.3.2 (Fall 2020).
“Death and Revolution: Thinking with Hester Pulter.” The Sundial: Premodern Pasts, Inclusive Futures AMCRS. 27 October.
2019
“’[L]ove that oughte ben secree’: Secrecy and Alternate Endings in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.” Studies in Philology, vol. 116, no. 4 (Fall 2019): 617-639.
“Precarious Travail, Gender, and Narration in Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World.” Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World. Eds. Bernadette Andrea and Patricia Akhimie. University of Nebraska Press. 273-291.
2018
“Gendered Circulation and the Marital Ship of State in Jonson’s The Staple of News.” Renaissance Drama 46, vol. 2 (Fall 2018): 193-212.
“Time, Gender, and Nonhuman Worlds.” (with Emily Kuffner and Elizabeth Crachiolo) Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World. Ed. Merry Wiesner-Hanks. Amsterdam University Press Gendering the Late Medieval and Early Modern World Series. 69-92.
Review: Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Hilda P. Koster, eds. Planetary Solidarity: Global Women’s Voices on Christian Doctrine and Climate Justice (Fortress, 2017). Reading Religion.
Review: Lowell Duckert. For All Waters: Finding Ourselves in Early Modern Wetscapes (U of Minnesota P, 2015). The Nautilus: A Maritime Journal of Literature, History, and Culture, vol. IX. 99-103.
2015
“A Shipwreck of Faith: Hazardous Voyages and Contested Representations in Milton’s Samson Agonistes.” Storms on Islands: Shipwreck and Island Motifs in Literature and the Arts. Eds. Brigitte Le Juez and Olga Springer. Brill/Rodopi. 151-170.
Selected Awards
- Folger Shakespeare Library Short-Term Fellowship—Omohundro Institute Fellow, 2021
- Shakespeare Association of America Travel Grant, 2015.
- Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award, UC Davis Graduate Studies, 2014.
- Research-Teaching Fellowship, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation UC Davis Initiative in Early Modern Studies, 2014.
- Dissertation Fellowship, UC Davis Department of English, Summers 2013 and 2014.