Thesis Title: The Voices of Coriolanus: Merit, Law, and Necessity
Supervisor: Colin Burrow and Lorna Hutson (David Norbrook, emeritus)
Research Interests: Classical receptions in 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; 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 enriching the dramatic texture. Current projects include 'Diverging traces: early modern receptions of Hesiod's Theogony', as well as Lex Facit Regem: The Rule of Law in Early Modern Jurisprudence and Shakespearean Tragedy. Published work has appeared in Renaissance Quarterly, Notes & Queries, and with Routledge.