Education

PhD, University of Texas at Austin, 2022
MLitt/MFA, Mary Baldwin University, 2016
BA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2010

Areas of Specialization

Shakespeare & early modern literature and drama
Contemporary drama & performance
Theatre history
Performance studies
Critical race studies
Adaptation studies
Black studies

Research

My work broadly examines the performance of race in Shakespeare and early modern drama and in contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare's plays. Currently, I am writing a book tentatively titled Siteless Substances: Staging Black Placelessness in Shakespeare Adaptations. This book assembles Shakespeare's plays, their adaptations, and other early modern and contemporary texts to examine how race and place become intertwined in Black diasporic identity and in anti-Black exclusion, in society at large and on the stage.

Selected Publications

• “‘Weak powres of passion’: Reading Spenser with Sianne Ngai.” In “Companionable Spenser,” ed. David Hillman, Joe Moshenska, and Namrantha Rao, special issue, Spenser Studies 37 (June 2023): 213-231. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/722427
• “The Anxiety of Duality and the Reduction to One: An Introduction to The Bloody Brother.” This Rough Magic, December 2015.

Selected Presentations

• “Eleazar was a white man: Phenomenologies of Race & Performance in Lust’s Dominion.” Blackfriars Conference, 2023.
• “Black Magic in Shakespeare’s Othello.” Modern Language Association, 2022.
• “Black Vernacular Shakespeares.” Renaissance Society of America (online), 2021.
• “Othello & Harlem Duet: Sites of Performing Blackness in Othello Narratives.” South Central Modern Language Association, 2018.
• “Learning, Language, and Theatrical Semiotics: The Dramatic Potential of Magic Books in Doctor Faustus and The Tempest.” Blackfriars Conference, 2015.
• “‘For without them he’s but a sot as I am’: Strategies of Linguistic Colonialism in The Tempest.” South Central Renaissance Conference, 2015.