I am a scholar of comparative medieval and early modern literature, with a particular focus on the emergence of the novella form, its reception, translation, and proliferation in early print culture, as well as theories of reading and their connections with premodern medicine and psychology. My dissertation, Textually Transmitted Diseases: The Lovesick Female Reader from Boccaccio to Burton, explores the rise of the novella form and its association with lovesickness—a medical condition in early modernity believed by some authors and translators to be cured or exacerbated by reading love stories. The dissertation traces a selection of highly popular novelle that achieved considerable commercial success and were swiftly translated into several European vernaculars (often from Latin or Italian to French, English, German, Dutch, and Spanish). Through their reception, I examine anxieties about the wider accessibility of love stories through the printing press and their perceived danger in "infecting" vulnerable readers, particularly women, with lovesickness, anticipating a later eighteenth- and nineteenth- century discourse that connects female readers, sexual immorality, and the novel. 

I hold degrees in English, Classics, Theology, and Modern Languages from the Universities of Exeter and Oxford. My teaching experience includes classes on Milton (co-taught with Prof. Russ Leo), Literature and Medicine, the Art & Archaeology of Plague (Art History Department), Foundations of Psychological Thought (Psychology Department), and German language instruction for the PIIRS Vienna Global Seminar. I have published on Philip Sidney’s re-workings of Aristotle’s Poetics and on the recently discovered copy of Milton’s First Folio.

Working Languages: English, German, French, Italian, Latin

Interests: Renaissance poetics and rhetoric, the novella, humanism, translation, the history of medicine, gender and sexuality, the figure of the female reader.