As an advisor, I believe in fostering original work that is both rigorous and creative, passionate and yet honest, historically-informed and also visionary about the future contributions that scholarship can make to our world.

Dissertations I am directing or have directed: 

 

Merita Ljubanovic: "Racing and Erasing Mediterranean Women in Early Modern English Literature"(in progress)

 

Matthew Walsh: "Human-Animal Epiphanic Encounter in Early Modern England" (in progress)

 

Sharanya Sridhar, ““Global Genres, Local Shakespeares: Post-Independence Tamil Cinema and the Embodiments of WorldLiterature,”” (in progress) 

 

John Yargo, “Saturnine Ecologies: Environmental Catastrophe in the Early Modern World, 1550-1688” (2022) [winner of the SAA Leeds Barroll Dissertation Prize, 2023]

 

Yunah Kae, “Racial Poetics: Early Modern Race and the Dramatic Form of Comedy” (2022) 

 

Becky Friedman, “The Contradictions of Jewish Representation on the English Renaissance Stage” (2022) 

 

Will Steffen, “Globalizing Nature on the Shakespearean Stage” (2019) [winner of the SAA Leeds Barroll Dissertation Prize, 2020]

 

Josephine Hardman, “Tragicomic Transpositions: The Influence of Spanish Prose Romance on Early Modern English Tragicomedy” (2017) 

 

Katy Rodin, “Prosthetizing the Soul: Reading, Seeing, and Feeling, in Seventeenth-Century Devotion” (2016) 

 

Nathaniel Leonard, “The Reflexive Scaffold: Metatheatricality, Genre, and Cultural Performance in English Renaissance Drama” (2013) 

 

 

Dissertation Committees: 

 

Catherine Tisdale, “Adaptive Transformations and Stranger Fictions on the Early Modern Stage” (2020) 

 

David Katz, “To Weigh the World Anew”: Poetics, Rhetoric, and Social Struggle, from Sidney’s Arcadia to Shakespeare's Theater” (2018) 

 

Liz Fox, “Theatre of Exchange: The Cosmopolitan Stage of Jacobean London” (2018) 

 

Jess Landis, “Affecting Manhood: Masculinity, Effeminacy and the Fop Figure in Early Modern Drama” (2013) 

 

Jordan Zajac, “The Everyday Feast: Recreational Consumption and Commerce in Early Modern English Drama” (2013) 

 

Philip Palmer, “The World Inscribed: Literary Form, Travel, and the Book in England, 1580–1660” (2013) 

 

 

Sampling of Undergraduate Theses Directed: 

 

Michaela Godding, “Whale: The Intimate and Invaluable Ruminations of Performing Female Trauma” (live performance), 2019 

 

Lucia O’Corozine, “Playing Scheherazade: Trauma, Healing and Feminist Revisionist Mythology,” 2019 

 

Casey Chon, “Why Arabic is So ‘Difficult’: A Critique of Arabic Teaching Assumptions and Practices in the United States,” 2018 

 

Temperance Dewar, “Poetry: Writing, Craft, and Community” (poetry and photography), 2017 

 

Nathan Frontiero, “See What They Know” (short fiction), 2017 [second reader] 

 

Natalie Sheppard, “Fiction and Fantasy: Inter-Imperialism and the Turkish Female Voice,” 2015 

 

Shaylene Riley, “Witty Words and Sharp Tongues: Women’s Power and Language in Shakespeare’s Plays,” 2015 

 

Jackson Barrett, “Collected Poems,” 2015 

 

Tasya Abbot, “Redirecting Ophelia: Narrative Intervention and Dynamics of Discomfort in Shakespearean Spaces” (live performance) 2014 

 

Vinh Nguyen, “‘Race, Literacy and the American Dream’: Rewriting Asian American Citizenship in the U.S. National Imaginary and Literature,” 2012