Degrees and institutions granting the degree

• Ph.D. English Language and Literature, New York University (2006)
• B.A. English Literature and Music, Drew University (1999)

Professional Areas of Specialty

Renaissance literature, including drama, lyric poetry and prose
Travel writing and early modern colonial writings
Interdisciplinary interests include Renaissance music and history of science
Genre studies, Cultural Materialism/ Marxism

Selected publications and/or projects

Books:

Telling True Tales of Islamic Lands: Forms of Mediation in Early English Travel Writing, 1575-1630.

Apple-Zimmerman Series in Early Modern Culture.  Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, forthcoming spring/summer 2011.

Telling True Tales of Islamic Lands examines early modern English printed works (1575-1630) which claimed that their stories about Muslim lands and peoples were "true," interrogating what a "true story" might mean in this era and how such texts asked to be read.  Treating anonymously written news pamphlets and travel writings by George Sandys, the Sherley brothers, Thomas Saunders and Richard Hakluyt, this book explores the relationship between the varying generic contexts of these travel accounts, their authors, and the different reading communities that consumed such printed works.  By examining generic and social pressures on travel authors as they crafted their tales of early modern Islamicate cultures, Telling True Tales places at the center of its inquiry the question of how knowledge about these foreign lands and peoples was produced, vetted, and accepted as "true." 

Articles:

• "'Let the place passe, the thing itself we know to be true': textual truths and lived experience in George Sandys' Relation of a Journey begun in 1610 and William Biddulph's The travels of certaine Englishmen."  In Judy Hayden and Nabil Matar, eds.  Through the Eyes of the Beholder: The Holy Land 1517-1714.  Brill Publishers (forthcoming). 
• "Forming the Captivity of Thomas Saunders: Hakluyt's Editorial Practices and their Ideological  Effects."  In Dan Carey and Claire Jowitt, eds. Richard Hakluyt and Collected Travel Writing in Early Modern Europe.  Ashgate & The Hakluyt Society (forthcoming).
• "'Fair and Balanced' News from the Continent: English Newsbook Readers and the Thirty-Years War."  Prose Studies 29, no. 3 (Winter 2007): 323-335.
• "'Plain Broad Narratives of Substantial Facts': Credibility, Narrative, and Hakluyt's The Principall Navigations."  Renaissance Quarterly 59, no. 3 (Autumn 2006): 768-794.

Selected Awards/ Honors:

• NEH Summer Seminar Participant, "Remapping the Renaissance: Exchange Between Early Modern Europe and Islam."  Hosted by the Centre for Renaissance and Baroque Studies, University of Maryland, June-July 2010.
• Moderator for NEH seminar site: http://earlymodernexchange.ning.com/
• UNL College of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award, 2010.
• AFCON (Academic Freedom Coalition of Nebraska) Annual Academic Freedom Award, 2009.

Courses Regularly Taught:

English Authors before 1800 (ENGL 230)
Beyond the Bawdy: Sex, Gender, & Cross-Dressing in Shakespeare (ENGL 230A & 4/830A)
Shakespeare: Political Authority & Language (ENGL 230A & 4/830A)
Art, Literature, Science, Travel: Power & the Renaissance Court (ENGL 363)
Was there a time before race? early modern English travel and ethnographic writing (ENGL 930)