I work at the intersection of literary criticism, cultural studies, and theater history and am interested most broadly in popular entertainment cultures. Below are some of my current and future research projects. For published work, see my publications.

Lively Things: Puppet Performance and Renaissance English Theater

My first book project reconstructs the wide and varied range of late medieval and early modern puppet performance in England to offer a more capacious sense of early English theatricality and its performers. Covering styles from articulated sculptures to rod, glove, shadow, and body puppets, the book examines how puppet theater intersects with religious, fairground, processional, and court performance along with commercial drama that it rivalled and outlasted. It combines original archival research with fresh analysis of familiar texts and theatrical objects through the lens of puppetry. The book places evidence of puppet performance carefully alongside on a wide range of literary references to puppetry to demonstrate the cultural associations of puppetry in early modern England and theater history more broadly that puppet practice complicates. By reconstructing late medieval and early modern puppet practice and its interfaces with other performance modes, the book offers frameworks for understanding the materiality of performance and the agency of theatrical objects. It offers particularly early modern theories of material agency as they intersect with theatrical practice. This book aims to answer three core questions: What constitutes early modern puppet performance? How did puppets’ materiality matter? What does puppet performance reveal about object agency in the context of theatrical performance? Chapters elaborate the range of late medieval and early modern puppetry styles, contexts, and practices—many of which exceed conventionally narrow definitions of the puppet—and how they operate in performance. I show how puppets’ materiality shapes performance within and beyond puppetry and how puppetry illuminates the agency of theatrical objects by placing puppets’ object bodies in complex relationships with human, animal, and divine bodies. Ultimately, puppetry illustrates how ephemeral and material theatrical practices complicate existing models of early modern theatricality.

Magic & Medicine on the Early Modern Stage

My second planned book project expands my interest in popular theatrical technologies into the history of science to consider the slippage between magic and medicine as embodied theater. Magic and medicine overlap in several different kinds of performances that chart how changing bodies are represented on stage. In late medieval drama, the stock figure of the quack doctor revives dead characters on the stage, destabilizing the theatrical conventions that distinguish live and dead bodies. In streets and plays like Jonson’s Volpone, mountebanks travel with clowns who perform illness to demonstrate the curative powers of the drugs for sale, but the drugs’ effectiveness is often an illusion and techniques for feigning illness—like consuming massive quantities of butter to line the stomach—could sometimes produce real illness. London hospitals, like those depicted in The Changeling and The Honest Whore, also functioned as both medical and theatrical spaces as visitors paid to observe the antics of their mentally ill residents, whose presumed madness was often linked in the cultural imagination to supernatural forces. The gendered force of supernatural knowledge is embodied by the witches that populate Renaissance drama like John Ford’s The Witch of Edmonton and the literature surrounding the persecution of women as witches. Literary witches offering magic as medicine represent fantastical versions of the real scientific knowledge developed by women in domestic spaces as cooks, brewers, and ad hoc nurses. Together, these performances illustrate the overlap between magic and medicine as cultural discourses in the ways that they are deployed onstage in similar ways to similar effects.