My research sits at the intersection of early modern Irish and British literary culture, the history of the book, and Catholic writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I am broadly interested in how imaginative, historical, and legal texts participated in the construction of national and confessional identities in the period, and in the material conditions under which those texts were produced and circulated.
My current monograph project, Degenerate Éire: Imagining the Lost Nation in Early Modern Ireland and Britain, examines the production of an Irish national consciousness across sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts. Drawing on sources ranging from bardic poetry to colonial legal writing, Degenerate Éire takes seriously both the Irish- and English-language traditions and their entanglement with questions of degeneration, dispossession, and cultural survival. Recent work connected to this project has appeared in Renaissance Studies and Atlantic Studies.
I also serve as Managing and Contributing Editor to The Complete Works of Robert Southwell, a five-volume critical edition forthcoming with Oxford University Press. This project has deepened my engagement with Jesuit literary and intellectual culture more broadly, and I have developed a parallel research interest in Jesuit drama and Jesuit historiography, particularly the work of Edmund Campion, the tradition of Jesuit history plays, and the literature produced in connection with the Japanese Mission. I was recently awarded a Visiting Fellowship at Sophia University, Tokyo, to pursue this work, and I am co-curating an exhibition, "British Jesuits: The Northern Connection," at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire.
My research has been supported by a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant, the Katharine F. Pantzer Jr Research Fellowship of the Bibliographical Society, and a Maddock Research Fellowship at Marsh's Library, Dublin, among other awards.
I teach across the early modern period, with a particular focus on literature from the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. In addition to the period papers, I teach on early modern drama, Irish poetry, and the history of literary theory.
Undergraduate Teaching
I teach the period papers from the mid-sixteenth to the early nineteenth century for Jesus College, the Faculty of English, and interdisciplinary papers for the Joint Schools of History and English (HENG) and Classics and English (CLENG).
