Publications

Thicker than Water: Blood, Affinity, and Hegemony in Early Modern Drama (Strode Studies for Early Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Alabama Press, 2023)

Thicker than Water interrogates the roots of the belief that similarity in blood dictates love and affinity by returning to the early modern Europe with its omnipresent discourse of blood, examining its role in the creation and maintenance of oppressive social structures. The early modern discourse of blood promoted the idea that similarity in blood dictates greater love or affinity. Or, put simply, “like likes like.“ This discourse helped to stabilize the boundaries of both kinship groups and social class, and its logic would extend to discourses concerning more legible realms of difference, be they ethnic or racialized. This book examines how drama from England, France, and Italy interrogates these assumptions about blood and love, exposing their political function. In staging a particular limit case for these beliefs in plots of love, courtship, and marriage (e.g., blood feuds or incest), these plays illustrate that blood functions not as a biological basis for affinities, but discursively. Moreover, this drama features the voices of marginalized groups, unprivileged by this ideology, which present views outside of this bloody worldview. Yet these characters also reveal that finding alternative vocabularies to society’s bloody discourse is both extremely difficult and often ineffectual, further evidenced by their persistence today.

Journal Articles

“The Story of Romantic Love and Polyamory,” co-authored with philosopher Michael Milona, special Issue of Journal of Applied Philosophy, Edited by Ellie Anderson, Justin Clardy, and Carrie Jenkins (Forthcoming)

This interdisciplinary project explores the intersection of romantic love – understood as an essentially literary and historical phenomenon – with contemporary discourses surrounding polyamory. This project is coauthored with a philosopher (Michael Milona, Toronto Metropolitan University), whose expertise on affect and emotion complements my own recent explorations of literary representations of love (taking my cue from Denis de Rougemont’s seminal work). Our central question is whether the emancipatory potential of polyamory requires ultimately rejecting romantic love, or whether the story of romance can be salvaged and “rewritten.”

“‘Infect in Similitude’ and Shakespeare’s Hamlet,” Studies in English Literature (1500-1900) 62.2 (Spring 2022): 323-45. (Published 2024)

This article examines the vocabulary of likeness, similitude, and replication in Shakespeare’s disease-ridden Denmark, which aligns with early modern theories of contagion from Paracelsus and Fracastoro. For in this context, the play’s preoccupation with incest assumes a new cast; incest — being ‘too much,’ too alike, or an excess of ‘natural affinity’ — is the disease of both the body and the body politic. Hamlet reveals that likeness is not only the method of contagion, but also its source, namely a perpetual desire for similarity, the known, the status quo. Consequently, Hamlet’s insistence on the value of individual difference and distinction contrasts with the play’s closed, endogamous systems of power and privilege.

"‘I do play the Touch’: Touchstone and Testing in As You Like It," Studies in Philology 121.1 (2024): 135-62.

This article takes as its subject a semantic explication of the fool’s name, Touchstone, unpacking and restoring its connotations by tracking its usage in early modern print material contemporaneous with Shakespeare’s play. This examination reveals that the ‘touchstone’ (a stone to test gold's value) metaphorically designated a method to discover something or someone's true nature or identity, and appeared in the context of testing religious allegiance with more violent connotations. This enlarged context for Touchstone’s name gives us a better sense for how the characters of As You Like It, fueled by political anxieties, understand Touchstone’s function in Arden; they treat him as a means for testing those around them: distinguishing noble from common, wise from foolish, and ally from enemy. Touchstone’s comedy, however, highlights the folly of this enterprise and denies any such assurances. Rather than reveal the true characters or allegiances of his fellows, he consistently demonstrates that differences between persons amount to words, namely language in the form of proclamations and oaths performs or creates these differences. As You Like It, therefore, asks its audience to maintain an attitude of healthy skepticism about proof of identity or epistemological certainty. 

“Bloody Fray and Bleeding Daughters in Romeo and Juliet,” Early Modern Literary Studies 21.2 (2020): 1-21.

I maintain that Romeo and Juliet critiques the ideology of blood beneath the blood feud — a naturalized model for dictating affinity and enmity between persons thereby encouraging endogamy — by staging the bloody result of honoring consanguinity in these terms. Although Juliet proffers an alternative to this framework by suggesting that names, not blood, might account for identity, this alternative is lost to the existing ideological structure. Romeo and Juliet hope to establish relations of affinity between the warring families by forging new consanguineous ties via the blood-mixing upon their marriage. Yet assuming this ideology means assuming its violent consequences: a Galenic purge of the families’ enmity from their bloodlines by spilling Juliet’s blood.

“Empirical Errors: The Comedy of Errors and “Knowing” Metamorphosing Forms,” Philological Quarterly 98.1-2 (2019): 73-93.

This article considers Francis Bacon’s articulations of his new method — especially in the Novum Organum (1620) and Of The Wisdom of Ancients (1609) — alongside Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors (1594) in order to consider their overlapping, though ultimately divergent, epistemological concerns. I contend that both Shakespeare and Francis Bacon appeal to the language of metamorphosis to figure a problem within Aristotelian epistemology: visible appearance doesn’t accurately indicate essence, or a thing’s hidden nature. Yet unlike Bacon’s attempt to rescue the epistemological project by redefining form as a law of operation, Errors prompts us to embrace the ethical possibilities of indeterminacy or confusion such as solidarity or sympathy.

"Corneille’s Le Cid: A Tragedy of Talking Blood.” Cahiers du dix-septième siècle 18 (2017): 1-22.

While the classic political reading of Le Cid characterizes the play’s struggle as one between the older feudal power structures of the aristocracy and the emergent absolutist monarchy, I argue that both sides maintain similar assumptions with similarly violent consequences, namely that blood embodies virtues and identity. So long as these characters depend upon and invest in these discourses, whether in a blood feud or in a holy war against the Moors, blood will demand more blood. To have a bloodless future, and the romantic conclusion that the play seems to promise, necessitates rejecting this system entirely.

Selected Work in Progress

“A King and No King: Incestuous Polities,” invited contribution to collection Hematopoetics in the Renaissance: Bloody Talk, Talking Blood, edited by Ariane Balizet and Yan Brailowsky

Critics typically gloss the profusion of incest plots in the early modern period as indicative of a desire to be exempt from society’s mandate of exogamy. Yet incest isn’t simply the perfection of endogamy, it is the natural conclusion of the aristocracy’s already endogamous practices and the logics that support their hegemony, namely a biological doctrine whereby blood prescribes affinity. Incest plots then often expose the folly of the elite’s intense desire to maintain a closed system. Beaumont and Fletcher’s A King and No King is, on the surface, a play about the proper transferral of power to the appropriate bodies, one wherein endogamy, if not consanguineous incest, provides the tragicomic conclusion. However, the play empties blood of its value as the supposed arbiter of noble status, and instead features the bloody cost for the general population of the elite’s claims to station and power.

“BEIng in Love with (romantic) Love,” (with Michael Milona), invited contribution to volume “The Reflexivity and Normativity in Emotional Experience,” edited by Philipp Schmidt and Michela Summa (under contract with Cambridge University Press)

Popular wisdom has it that romantic love can be reflexive but that it shouldn’t be. But we argue that, at least in one sense, far from being a perversion of romantic love, being in love with love is essential to its nature. We develop our proposal as a helpful corrective to the leading definition of passionate/romantic love in relationship science, which understands it as a constellation of appraisals, feelings, and action tendencies that amount to an “intense longing for union with another” (Hatfield and Rapson, 1993). While there is much to be said in this view’s favor, it struggles to accommodate a pair of “dueling” tendencies characteristic of romantic love. On the one hand, lovers are moved to overcome all obstacles between self and beloved to consummate, or “quench,” their loving passion. Yet they are often moved to erect barriers between self and beloved to stave off such consummation. Such apparently conflicting tendencies are widespread in the literary touchstones that inform our concept of romantic love. They are also recurrent in first-hand accounts of those who have experienced love (e.g., Dorothy Tennov’s seminal work, Love and Limerence, 1979). We can explain these conflicting tendencies by recognizing that romantic love has no terminus (e.g., a union of selves, lives, or anything else) that can be articulated independent of the passion itself. What romantic love seeks is principally its own perpetuation; and such perpetuation is generally incompatible with the removal of all mental and physical obstacles separating lovers.

“Narrative Desires and Failures of Closure in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra”

Scholarship has long noted the similarity between the liebestod of Romeo and Juliet and that of Anthony and Cleopatra, though most scholars seem to gloss over one particular wrinkle in the case of the more mature couple: the extensive time delay separating their deaths. So why does this near perfect love-death go unfulfilled in this case, especially if one assumes that this play celebrates transcendent romantic love? Answering this puzzle requires not only a consideration of romantic love but also its relationship to narrative. Although existing psychoanalytic readings accurately identify the ways in which Cleopatra embodies a fantasy of bottomless desire, they miss the relationship between desire and narrative. Borrowing the theoretical framework for romantic love conceived by Swiss cultural theorist Denis de Rougemont, Cleopatra’s association with endless desire coincides with a denial of narrative closure, even in death. Shakespeare’s tragedy thus highlights the Freudian pleasure of delay, the way in which narrative depends on sustaining desire via narrative obstacle. Moreover, in the end, both protagonists share a concern for legacy: how a story might continually deny closure by “living on.”

“Romantic/Divine Love: A Theopoetic Consideration of the Early Modern Sonnet,” (with Michael Milona)

This project explores the intersection of discourses of romantic love and religion, examining romantic poetry of early modern England to investigate a central conundrum. Namely, romantic poetry is a making (a poesis) in the world of a fervent desire for something beyond the world, here not God but rather the divinized beloved. In poetry the transcendent is made immanent — especially in attending to the erotic or sensual — but its aim is nevertheless transcendent, a propulsion beyond this world. To better understand and interrogate this strange circularity, this paper engages with the Petrarchan love lyric Sidney and Spenser, with an eye towards the poetry of John Donne in both his erotic and holy sonnets.