Research

Current Research

My current book project, “The Spirit of the Nation: Women and Conversion in Early Modern English Drama,” develops a feminist literary history of religious conversion in early modern drama from 1590-1634. I study the representation of women in plays about conversion, bringing these dramatic works into conversation with an archive of biological, theological, and social discourses circulating about women during the period. I demonstrate how belief in women’s porosity and spiritual receptivity, coupled with their perceived influence in both domestic and public spheres, rendered women as weapons that could be deployed by either God or Satan in the ongoing battle for the soul of the English nation. My project argues that the early modern theatre participated in these debates by reinforcing and amplifying the links between the occult, secret nature of women and the interior, private nature of conversion, helping to establish a positive interpretation for women’s powers that situated them as holy, God-given, and imperative for the burgeoning English nation-state.

Forthcoming Research

My next project, tentatively titled “Black Magic Women: Witchcraft and Race in English Literature, 1485-1700,” will study how witchcraft literature played a key role in early modern race-making. Witchcraft literature has long been the object of gender-oriented sociohistorical scholarship. What has been crucially overlooked, however, are the ways in which mythologies surrounding witchcraft also responded and contributed to the anxieties about race and national identity provoked by the Reformation, increased global travel, and immigration into England. My project will argue that witchcraft literature was grounded within, perpetuated, and often exaggerated fears about racialized religious difference with specific emphasis on the imagined threat posed by blackness. This project will provide the first book-length study of witchcraft and race in English literature, and it will make contribute to both the study of English witchcraft and to the continued recovery of England’s literary legacy of anti-Black racism.