Thesis Title: The Voices of Coriolanus: Merit, Law, and Necessity
Supervisor: Colin Burrow and Lorna Hutson (David Norbrook, emeritus)
Research Interests: Sixteenth and 'long' seventeenth-century literature, including figures like Shakespeare, Chapman, Donne, Milton, Marvell, and Margaret Cavendish; political thinkers such as Machiavelli, Lipsius, Bodin, Hobbes, Locke, Burke, and Rousseau; international relations and Atlantic history, especially from 1500 to 1800; classical receptions in imaginative writing; the relationships between fictional worlds and political/legal history; utopias; the Enlightenment(s).
Doctoral Research: My dissertation develops a novel methodology for exploring political thought in Shakespearean drama. Instead of identifying partisan commitments or an impartial staging of opposing ‘sides’, a close reading of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (c. 1608) traces a subtle but highly structured and reiterative interplay between numerous strands of thought (neo-Stoic, Aristotelian, Machiavellian, etc.). The authorial patterns are individually unobtrusive but develop an undeniable collective force, inviting several important deductions and contributing richness and depth to the dramatic texture. Current projects include Lex Facit Regem: The Rule of Law in Early Modern Jurisprudence and Shakespearean Tragedy, and The Fragile Flower: Roots of Republics (which brings together international relations, multivariate statistics, and political philosophy). Published work has appeared in Renaissance Quarterly, Notes & Queries, and with Routledge.