2025-26 Long-term Fellow

Fugitive Poetics: Refugee Writing and the Matter of Troy

My project examines how contemporary anglophone poets of color use myths of Britain’s founding by Trojan refugees to craft their own stories of displacement and new beginnings. Juxtaposing materials at the Folger (incunabula and early modern printed texts) with modern poetry and audiovisual media, this project explores how refugee poets around the globe draw inspiration from Chaucer and Shakespeare to rethink collective memory and build dynamic communities. My comparative methods advance Medieval and Early Modern Studies while engaging Contemporary Poetics, Ethnic Studies, and Migration Studies.

2025-26 Long-term Fellow

Transit and the Early Caribbean

This project examines the relationship between diverse forms of travel, mapping, and the body in forming the early Caribbean as a geography of transit. With particular attention to the effects of of England and Spain’s respective and overlapping exercises of power in the region, I examine what new social formations of mobility emerge in the “New World” of the seventeenth century. I intend to explore how travel itself simultaneously provides access to and limitation upon notions of freedom that shape these nations’ approach to power in lasting ways, as well as offers profound avenues for self-definition for people moving in and out of the “New World.”

2025-26 Long-term Fellow

Distinguishing Race: Performing Knowledge in Early Modern Comedy

I am currently working on my first monograph, tentatively titled, Distinguishing Race: Performing Knowledge in Early Modern Comedy. My project traces how developments in comic conventions on the early modern English stage reflect and produce a logic of race. By examining pastoral romantic comedies, city comedies, satirical plays, and tragicomedies in the 16th and 17th centuries, I argue that playwrights advance a comic racial form which structurally precludes the ignorant from ever discerning the sanctioned tenets of knowledge within their play-world. Distinguishing Race thus offers a model to think through how early modern English comedies re-negotiate what it means to ‘know,’ and further, how they interrogate a racialization of knowledge itself.

2025-26 Long-term Fellow

Chaucer’s Black London

In November 2023, the UK minister Kemi Badenoch lodged a formal complaint against the Museum of London about an article I collaboratively published with several bioanthropologists and a bioarchaeologist. Her complaint called the work documenting the presence of fourteenth-century, London Black communities “woke archaeology.” We observed within our fields a systematic methodological whitewashing of the entire Western European medieval population record. No grave sites, other than our study’s two London sites, have been analyzed to determine the race of those buried. Scholars had assumed everyone was white. Similarly, in medieval legal records, there has been almost no discussion of several court documents that describe the everyday Black lives in medieval England.

I propose to build on Black Atlantic studies, like Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts,” and premodern critical race work to recover the histories of enslaved people who are often invisible in the archive. This book applies this methodology with records in London from 1350-1602 through the lens of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I choose Chaucer because he is a medieval London author whose literary place as the father of English poetry is consolidated through sixteenth-century, London print publication. This book brings an interdisciplinary method focused on race, gender, sexuality, and class that pulls from newly reassessed archives to imagine a premodern Black London.

2025-26 Long-term Fellow

Tuning the Body: Musical Health Regimens in Early Modern England

Tuning the Body: Musical Health Regimens in Early Modern England is a cultural history of music’s use in routines of domestic healthcare. Employing approaches from music studies, book history and the history of medicine, this project analyzes a corpus unknown to musicology: music collected in early modern recipe books alongside medicines and food in the seventeenth-century Anglosphere. These carefully curated collections of musical and medicinal materials are, I argue, evidence of music’s role in everyday household care, an opaque domain whose study not only sheds light on how music actually functioned as medicinal beyond its theoretical healing powers, but also gives us rare access to the little understood musico-medical practices of women and household servants.

2025-26 Long-term Fellow

The Insular Globe: Animals and Landscapes of Colonization, Ireland c. 700-1700

My book project combines historical, archaeological, and geographical evidence to argue that people maintained a complex and exploitative relationship with their natural environment long before modernity. I use animal experiences to explore how environmental change was created by colonial activity. Animal encounters with colonization document a deeply embedded and symbiotic relationship with humans in the pre-modern world. Ultimately, I explain that our long-ago past with animals shapes how we interact with the environment today.

2025-26 Long-term Fellow

In a Violent Manner: Sodomy, Same-Gender Sexual Violence and the English Law, c. 1600-1800

My project is the first monographic study of sodomy in early modern England to focus on sexual violence. It starts with a legal conundrum: sodomy laws did not distinguish between consensual and non-consensual acts of sodomy, and this conceptualization rendered all parties—whether consenting or not—as legally culpable and therefore punishable. Despite this, my research finds that men and boys frequently chanced self-incrimination and approached common law and naval courts to charge assailants of coercively sodomizing them. In so doing, they fought for redress and the recognition of their victimhood before legal practitioners. I argue that men and boys’ accusations of violence, and the courts’ responses to them, elucidate the nature of legal sexual victimhood in early modern England.

2025-26 Long-term Fellow

Much Depends on Dinner: Early Modern Foodways, Performance , and Dramatic Representation

My project brings together the fields of early modern, food history, theatre and performance, and race studies in an interdisciplinary approach to the study of literature and drama in which foodways “perform” in a process of colonial categorization that is still relevant in contemporary politics of identity and race.

Drawing on archival material in English, Arabic, and Spanish, I investigate three key examples—couscous, strawberries, and bacalhau (salt cod)—to illuminate how food-related practices were markers through which identity was produced, transformed, and erased, on and beyond the stage, in England, Spain, and the transatlantic.

Through these three case studies, I demonstrate that the historical contextualization of foodways offers a wider cultural and period-specific understanding of theatrical and performative allusions to them as part of the systematic colonial process of taxonomizing people—a process that reverberates in the social hierarchies throughout the contemporary world.

2025-26 Long-term Public Humanities Fellow

Linguistic Hierarchies: Gullah-Geechee x Shakespearean English (What Language Remembers)

What Language Remembers is an interdisciplinary exploration of the historical, performative, and linguistic intersections between Gullah-Geechee and Shakespearean English, aimed at elevating the Gullah-Geechee tradition through a critical lens. Drawing on historical research, linguistic and phonetic analysis, and storytelling practices, the project highlights how both systems—one shaped by the survival strategies of enslaved Africans, the other by the literary ambitions of Renaissance England – use rhythm, tone, and narrative to transmit identity, memory, and resistance.

Rather than seeking equivalence, the project places these traditions in dialogue to challenge linguistic hierarchies and affirm Gullah-Geechee as a sophisticated and vital cultural system. Through the collaborative work of JaMeeka Holloway, Nakeisha Daniel, and Dr. Jessica Berry, the project culminates in public-facing programs including a live storytelling event, podcast series, and participatory workshops.

2025-26 Long-term Public Humanities Fellow

Linguistic Hierarchies: Gullah-Geechee x Shakespearean English (What Language Remembers)

What Language Remembers is an interdisciplinary exploration of the historical, performative, and linguistic intersections between Gullah-Geechee and Shakespearean English, aimed at elevating the Gullah-Geechee tradition through a critical lens. Drawing on historical research, linguistic and phonetic analysis, and storytelling practices, the project highlights how both systems—one shaped by the survival strategies of enslaved Africans, the other by the literary ambitions of Renaissance England – use rhythm, tone, and narrative to transmit identity, memory, and resistance.

Rather than seeking equivalence, the project places these traditions in dialogue to challenge linguistic hierarchies and affirm Gullah-Geechee as a sophisticated and vital cultural system. Through the collaborative work of JaMeeka Holloway, Nakeisha Daniel, and Dr. Jessica Berry, the project culminates in public-facing programs including a live storytelling event, podcast series, and participatory workshops.