Research

Monograph in Progress

Anatomical Forms: The Science of the Body in Early Modern Women’s Poetry emerges from a deep curiosity about the gendered politics surrounding touch, skin, and paper in early modern England. Tracing the collision of women’s poetic practice and emerging anatomical methods in the period, I argue that women writers wielded poetry as a scientific tool in order to explore and challenge emerging knowledge of the body. Alongside close readings of poetry by Mary Sidney Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer, Mary Wroth, Hester Pulter, Margaret Cavendish, and Jane Barker, I track methodological developments in anatomy and surgery, as well as anatomists’ attempts to transfer knowledge gained through tactile practice onto the two-dimensional page. Each chapter of Anatomical Forms challenges readers to rethink what counts as science and, in the process, brings into focus a feminist history of poetic form centered on material practice.

Published Work

“Mary Sidney’s Postmortem Poetics.” Shakespeare Studies 49 (2021): 175-80.

“Reading Anatomy Texts Like Poetry (and why we should do it more often).” The Collation, Folger Shakespeare Library Blog. 2021.

“Invocation of the Elements.” By Hester Pulter (Poem 41, Amplified Edition). The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making. Eds. Leah Knight and Wendy Wall. 2021.

“Pulter’s Garden” (Poem 118, Curation). The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making. Eds. Leah Knight and Wendy Wall. 2021.

“The Algorithm’s Needlework Origins.” The Sundial, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. 2021.

“Before Lovelace.” Lady Science. 2020.

“The Snail, the Tulip, and the Bee.” By Hester Pulter (Poem 118, Amplified Edition). The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making. Eds. Leah Knight and Wendy Wall. 2020.

“Review: Early Modern Manuscripts Online.” Early Modern Digital Review 3.2 (2020).

“Knowing Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19.3 (2019): 1-35.

“Granular Reading: Texture, Language, and Surface Marks in Titus Andronicus.” Titus Andronicus: The State of Play. Ed. Farah Karim-Cooper. Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2019. 179-99.

“Digital Feminist Archives.” The Recipes Project. 2019.

“Feminist Queer Temporalities in Aemilia Lanyer and Lucy Hutchinson.” Co-authored with Penelope Anderson. Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World. Ed. Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks. Amsterdam University Press, 2018. 159-84.

“Intimate Correspondence: Negotiating the Materials of Female Friendship in Margaret Cavendish’s Sociable Letters.” Women’s Writing 26.4 (2019): 456-472.