Folger Salon with Jareema Hylton, Sarah Koval, and Victoria McAlister

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

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.