About

I’m a writer, scholar, editor, and educator living in Philadelphia, where I teach courses on gender and sexuality in medieval literature and culture. My first book, Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain (Cornell University Press, 2018), analyzes sexual education, consent, and rape culture from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to the Access Hollywood tape. Obscene Pedagogies won the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship’s 2020 prize for Best First Book of Medieval Feminist Scholarship.

I have published essays for both public and academic audiences on a variety of topics, including obscene stories in medieval sermons, medieval histories of intoxication and consent, the racialized history of the word “wench,” medieval impotence trials, Pattie McCarthy’s margerykempething, obscene riddles, the medieval origins of the word “fuck,” and the 600-year-old history of “Teen Mom” entertainment. In addition to writing and teaching, I’m an editor for the journal Exemplaria: Medieval/Early Modern/Theory, and I serve on the editorial boards for Medieval Institute Publications’ Premodern Transgressive Literatures series, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Press, and The Chaucer Review.

I have given invited campus talks on topics such as histories of intoxication and consent, reproductive justice and the history of the word “wench,” white feminism and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue, and resisting rape in the Middle Ages and today. I have also presented at workshops on how to teach classes on sexual violence in a sensitive, empowering fashion.

I am a diehard viewer of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, The Great British Bake Off, and many, many Bravo shows and a voracious consumer of celebrity gossip. And The Book of Margery Kempe is the book that made me decide to become a medievalist.