A scholar of early modern literary, cultural, and intellectual history, I am an Assistant Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education, University of Florida. Prior to my arrival in Gainesville in August 2024 I held a three-year Excellence Strategy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Hamburg in Germany.
My first book, Milton, Longinus, and the Sublime in the Seventeenth Century, was published by Oxford University Press in December 2023, and I am currently completing two major projects: a second monograph, Polemical Erudition: Scholarship and Politics in the English Revolution, which explores the relevance of humanist scholars and the European republic of letters to the political tumult of Britain in the 1640s and 1650s, and a translation of the Cambridge scholar (and tutor of Isaac Newton) Isaac Barrow’s De Religione Turcica, a Latin poem on Islam composed during a visit to Istanbul in 1658. I am in the very early stages of developing my next book, provisionally entitled Liberty to Know: Milton on the Freedom to Philosophize, which will offer a comprehensive new study of Milton’s influential 1644 tract Areopagitica and the Anglo-American free speech tradition. I have written over thirty peer-reviewed articles on topics across the range of my interests, which include 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.
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.