Selected Publications
My work offers genealogies of contemporary concepts like biopolitics and disability to show their roots in early modern cultural artifacts and sociopolitical formations. The result, I believe, is an increased recognition of both the political complexity of the past and the urgent social and theoretical implications of its persistence in the present.
Books
Impotent: A Sexual History of Early Capitalism (In Progress)
This book integrates sexuality and disability studies to reevaluate labor, race, and capitalism in early modern English literature and culture. Using “impotence” as a lens—both a legal category for parish poor relief and a marker of disabled identity—it argues that disabled identity emerged as a socioeconomic construct earlier than commonly recognized, predating modern medical discourse. It also connects this classed disability to the history of race and sexuality, highlighting how state regulation of sexuality disciplined citizens across classes to embody labor and racial fitness. Disability, therefore, was key to shaping modern political subjectivity and capitalism’s transformation of labor into human capital.
Rogue Sexuality in Early Modern English Literature: Desire, Status, Biopolitics
Oxford University Press, 2022, Paperback, 2025
Editorial Projects
Early Modern Biopolitics (with Jennifer Rust) (In Progress)
Biopolitics is often treated as a keyword, a subset of other general categories (power, sexuality, etc.). But we suggest a reversal of this procedure that positions biopolitics itself as a generative category that can be broken into concepts that demonstrate the pervasiveness of biopolitical discourses and structures in the early modern world.
Trans Milton (with Urvashi Chakravarty and Colby Gordon) (In Progress)
Despite being called “Our Lady of Christ’s College” as a Cambridge student and being described by his filial amanuenses as “ready for milking,” Milton has so far largely evaded study from an intersectional trans analytic. This collection seeks to provoke Milton studies to reckon with the gender fluidity inherent in Milton’s work, and also to bring Milton to trans studies. That is, we wish to bring what Nigel Smith describes as Milton’s unique commitment to “positive transformation in all spheres of human activity” to contemporary work in trans studies. We think doing so will contribute to trans studies’ engagement with important Miltonic subjects, including liberty, theology, and identity.
“Desiring History and Historicizing Desire”
Special issue, JEMCS: Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 16.2 (Spring 2016), co-edited with Melissa Sanchez and Will Stockton
Articles and Book Chapters
“Asexuality, Impotence, and Colonial Desire in Richard Brome’s The Antipodes” (Under Review)
Early Modern Asexualities, eds. Liza Blake, Cat Clifford, and Aley O’Mara (Under review at Cornell University Press)
“Impotent”
in Logomotives: Words that Change the Early Modern World, 1400-1700, eds. Marjorie Rubright and Stephen Spiess (Edinburgh University Press, 2025)
“Mayhem’s Shadow: Seeing Debility, Race, and Soldiery in Henry IV, Parts 1&2”
Shakespeare Jahrbuch 161 (2025), Forthcoming
“Roguery and Reproduction in The Winter’s Tale”
in A Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, Race, ed. Valerie Traub (Oxford University Press, 2016)
“Mastery, Masculinity, and Sexual Cozening in Ben Jonson’s Epicoene”
in SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 53.2 (Spring 2013)