About

I’m a writer, scholar, 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 medieval histories of intoxication and consent, medieval rape reparations and the Bill Cosby case, the racialized history of the word “wench,” medieval impotence trials, rape and rage in Chaucer’s Legend of Philomela, 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 Exemplaria: Medieval/Early Modern/Theory and for The Sundial (a public-facing digital publication by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies), and I serve on the editorial board for Medieval Institute Publications’ Premodern Transgressive Literatures series and The Chaucer Review.

I have given invited campus talks on topics such as histories of intoxication and consent, resisting rape in the Middle Ages and today, and black feminist approaches to medieval literature. 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 and many, many Bravo shows (Summer House and Real Housewives of Potomac are current favorites) and a voracious consumer of celebrity gossip. Teen Mom: Young and Pregnant is my favorite Teen Mom franchise. Books I’ve read and enjoyed recently include Becky Mandelbaum’s Bad Kansas, Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby, Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex, Danielle Evans’s The Office of Historical Corrections, Rax King’s Tacky, Laura Passin’s Borrowing Your Body, Pattie McCarthy’s Wifthing, Kyla Schuller’s The Trouble With White Women, Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating and Cooling, Liz Moore’s Long Bright River, and Leila Mottley’s Nightcrawling.