I am a scholar of early modern English literary and religious history, and received my PhD in English literature from Harvard University. I am currently associate professor of English literature at Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), a new university founded in collaboration with MIT.

 

I am the author of Devotional Experience and Erotic Knowledge in the Literary Culture of the English Reformation (Oxford University Press, 2023). My academic articles have been published or are forthcoming in Modern Philology, Shakespeare Quarterly, Milton Studies, SEL Studies in English Literature, Multicultural Shakespeare, Literature and Theology, Notes and Queries, Parergon, and the Routledge Handbook on Shakespeare and Religion.
 

First book

As a scholar who works at the intersection of Renaissance literature and religious culture, my interests center on the everyday experiences that shaped the lives of English people from the European Reformation onward. My first book reads the poetry of Shakespeare, Donne, Greville, Herrick, and Milton in the context of popular religious practices that grew out of the English Reformation. I argue that new attention to experience in Protestant popular divinity gave early modern thinkers and poets a new epistemological framework for imagining and interpreting devotional intention and access. I maintain that these Reformed models for devotion not only shaped how people experienced their encounters with God, but also had profound implications for how these English poets described sexual longing and access to earthly beloveds in the literary production of the period. In placing the works of English poets in conversation with devotional writers such as William Perkins, Samuel Hieron, Joseph Hall, and William Gouge, my book demonstrates how the English Calvinist tradition attributed epistemological potential to a wide range of ordinary experience, including sexual experience.

 

In writing this book, my goal was to think about daily lived experience for English people as it took place beyond the confines of formal worship in the English church, by focusing on aspects of popular worship practices that have been overlooked by literary historians in their approaches to early modern writing. In doing so, I have also paid particular attention to poetic expressions of homoerotic longing that have too often been overlooked by scholars of Reformed theology, and four chapters in my first book make a case for why what might be described as queer or gay love poems held an unexpected yet valued place in the broad tent of early modern English devotional culture.
 

Second book

My most recent scholarly work situates the literary afterlife of the European Reformation in contexts of global exchange, a research area that has been inspired by my time living and teaching in Singapore—an island city-state that has been at the heart of international maritime trade and cultural exchange for more than five hundred years. I am currently revising a second book project which I am calling Cosmopolitanism after the European Reformation: Natural Law, Toleration, and Religious Exchange in the Global Renaissance. In my new book project, I argue that the Reformation ushered in new ways of thinking about social and political inclusion—ones that were not tethered to national or religious identity. In doing so, I trace a literary history of the idea of natural rights in contexts of global exchange—from the early Reformation to the early Enlightenment.

Contrary to political historians who have maintained that Enlightenment ideas about natural law grew out of a reaction against the religious culture of the Reformation, in my second book, I maintain that the kernel of these later ideas about natural rights, political inclusion, and freedom of worship and belief had their origin in Reformation thought. In my alternative account of natural rights discourse, I demonstrate that the conversation about the political, social, and moral obligations that people owed to each other in civic society predated early Enlightenment theories of natural law by more than two centuries. More importantly, I argue that from the outset, these conversations about rights were intended to be inclusive of non-European and non-Christian peoples. I maintain that the theological contexts of the European Reformation were indispensable to the intellectual and cultural developments that I trace—from Tyndale to Shakespeare, from Ming China to the Dutch Republic, and from the Lutheran roots of the English Reformation to the dissident Protestantism of the early Americas.

 

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I have a B.A. in classical studies and English literature from the University of Chicago, and a M.St. in early modern British literature from Oxford.

Before coming to SUTD, I spent a year away from academia and worked as director of communication and development at a nonprofit focused on high impact giving targeting global poverty initiatives.