I’m a PhD candidate in the Department of English Literature at Harvard University, where I focus on English Romantic poetry.
My published work has appeared in The Coleridge Bulletin, North Wind: A Journal of George MacDonald Studies, The Journal of Romanticism, and The Journal of Scottish Studies, and The Wordsworth Circle. I have presented research at the Northeast Modern Language Association Conference, the Biennial Coleridge Conference, the Annual Wordsworth Conference, the British Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies, and elsewhere.
As Teaching Fellow at Harvard, I have taught courses on rhetoric and composition, Shakespeare, American poetry 1620-1850, and global lyric poetry from Sappho to Taylor Swift.
As a scholar interested in public-facing education, I founded the Antrim Literature Project, an online public humanities platform where I, along with other graduate students, teach and host public lectures. You can find my short-form literary content on my YouTube channel, CloseReadingPoetry.
Dissertation
My research asks: how might spiritual and devotional sensibilities govern the shape of sound and meaning in lyric poetry? How might the devotional impulses within lyric traditions be considered from a literary perspective? And how might literary criticism account for the spiritual awareness of devotional and non-religious poetry beyond the contemporary categories of the religious and the secular? Questions like these have informed my research in the fields of British Romantic literature, English poetry, and poetics.
My project, “William Wordsworth and the Poetics of Natural Piety,” argues that Wordsworth’s “natural piety”—his phrase for an innate, human impulse—should be considered a spiritual awareness in its own right, an awareness that governs and animates his poetics. My approach cuts against the grain of a dominant strain of scholarship that, for the past sixty years, has regarded the spiritual sensibilities of Romantic literature as fundamentally secular, as a retreat from, or assimilation of, true religion into a separate aesthetic category. As theories for evaluating Romantic literature, these secularization narratives often devalue its spiritual sensibilities as perfunctory, hackneyed, or even illegitimate expressions of religious thought. My thesis presents a new approach to this conventional narrative. Pairing close reading and philological methods with a grounding in the development of English religious and literary traditions, my dissertation contends that understanding the character of Wordsworth’s natural piety is necessary to properly interpret and evaluate his poetic art and achievement.
Research Interests. While my research focuses primarily upon English Romantic literature, my interests often lead me across disciplines and periods. My conference presentations, articles, and teaching experiences have covered aspects of early church and medieval theology, English medieval allegory, Shakespeare, sixteenth-century English theology, seventeenth-century devotional literature, the prose and poetry of the English Puritans and Carolingian divines, eighteenth-century English poetry and science, German idealism and early German Romanticism (Frühromantik), American Romantic poetry, Victorian novelists such as George MacDonald and Lewis Carroll, authors of the twentieth-century Oxford fantasy movement, contemporary poetry, and rhetoric and composition.