Profile
I am a post-doctoral research fellow on the ERC-funded project ‘Textuality and Diversity: A Literary History of Europe and its Global Connections, 1529–1683’ led by Professor Warren Boutcher. I completed my DPhil in English Literature at New College, Oxford in 2023. My doctoral thesis was the first study of the literary culture of English Catholics, produced during the English Civil Wars and Revolution. My research focuses on the relationships between literary form and political and religious debate in post-Reformation Europe.
Research
Research Interests:
- Early modern literature
- Neo-Latin drama and poetry
- Political, religious, and cultural history of the Long Reformation
- History of the book and manuscript studies
- Memory studies and the history of emotions
- The Baroque
Recent and On-Going Research
My research explores the interaction between the literary cultures and religious and political conflicts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.
I am currently a post-doc on the project ‘Textuality and Diversity: A Literary History of Europe and its Global Connections, 1529–1683’(https://www.qmul.ac.uk/textdiveglobal/). As part of this, I am writing a chapter on the representation of Byzantine history in Latin plays performed at Jesuit Colleges across Europe. This pedagogical and polemical drama was a transnational literary phenomenon; episodes from the history of the Eastern Roman Empire were frequently dramatized on Jesuit stages from the Spanish Netherlands to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. My chapter will ask how these plays imagine Byzantium and use its complex history to think about the identity and boundaries of post-Reformation Europe.
My doctoral thesis examined how English Catholics responded to the upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s in a range of literary forms written in English and Latin, at home and abroad, including tyrant tragedy, tragicomedy, love lyric, epic poetry, and political controversy. I argue that the particularly complex perspective of English Catholics on England’s intra-Protestant wars of religion shaped their writing. Though they wrote in all the major genres and forms of the period, they evade the labels, royalist, parliamentarian, or republican, which are often used to categorise the literature of these decades; this neglected literary culture thus offers new ways of thinking about the relationship between confessional identity, political allegiance, and literary style. I intend to revise my thesis for publication as a monograph.
I have published articles on the history of reading, the Elizabethan Jesuit and controversialist Robert Persons, the French Wars of Religion, and Christopher Marlowe.
Publications
‘Remembering the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Elizabethan England,’ Studies in Philology 118.2 (Spring 2021), 242-283, 10.1353/sip.2021.0009
‘Calculating History: A Mid-Seventeenth-Century Reader of Robert Persons’ A Conference about the Next Succession (1594/5),’ Review of English Studies 71.299 (April 2020), 272–291, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgz043
'Translation, praise, and politics in the poetry of Edmund Waller', English Literary Renaissance 55.1 (January 2025). https://doi.org/10.1086/733219
‘Actors, Soldiers, and Jesuits in Post-Reformation England: Joseph Simons’ 1648 Oration on Robert Persons and the Mission to England’, The Seventeenth Century (February 2025), 1–47. https://doi.org/10.1080/0268117X.2025.2458729
Public Engagement
In 2020, I co-curated a digital exhibition for the Museum of Oxford, entitled ‘Oxford Re-Formed’ (https://moxdigiexhibits.omeka.net/exhibits/show/oxford-re-formed), which traced how the sixteenth-century Reformation has been remembered and represented in Oxford over the past five hundred years and has shaped the material fabric of the city. In 2022–23, I worked as a research assistant for the Curators of the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, working on developing a new permanent exhibition that will narrate the history of the building and its uses from the late seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries.
