I am a scholar of early modern literary, cultural, and intellectual history with interests including Milton, Shakespeare, classical reception, Neo-Latin studies, the transnational republic of letters, the history of scholarship and education, orientalism, European-Islamic encounters, colonial America, and book history.
My first book, Milton, Longinus, and the Sublime in the Seventeenth Century, will be published by Oxford University Press in December and is now available for pre-order here (or here in the US). I am currently at work on a second book provisionally entitled Polemical Erudition: Scholarship and Politics in the English Revolution as well as several other projects, including a translation of Isaac Barrow’s De Religione Turcica, a Latin poem on Islam composed during a visit to Istanbul in 1658, and an edition of the Life of William Cavendish for the forthcoming Complete Works of Margaret Cavendish. I have published over twenty articles on subjects ranging from the influence of academic drama on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to the circulation of a Latin treatise on Islam by the Polish-born Ottoman dragoman Ali Ufki. I was interviewed for the blog of the Royal Society about my discovery of several unnoticed letters by Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (here).
PhD in English Studies, 2021
University of Exeter
MA in Classical Studies, 2015
University of Pennsylvania
BA with High Honors in Latin, 2013
Oberlin College
No author in the English canon seems more deserving of the epithet sublime than John Milton. Yet Milton’s sublimity has long been dismissed as an invention of eighteenth-century criticism. The poet himself, the story goes, could hardly have had any notion of the sublime, a concept that only took shape in the decades after his death with the advent of philosophical aesthetics.