Projects
A World of Words: Language, Earth and Embodiment in the Renaissance — Author
My current book project traces the earthly substrates of renaissance lexical culture. In its broadest strokes, the book examines period-specific ways of thinking about human sameness and difference that emerge when one attends to how language and linguistic identity are imaginatively linked not only to ethnicized and racialized human bodies, but also to a diversity of earthly matter. In it, I investigate how lexicographers, language instructors, antiquarians, chorographers, horticulturists, as well as dramatists and poets, variously conceived of the relationships between language, earth, and embodiment, ultimately developing a mode of thinking that I characterize as early modern "geo-linguistics."
Logomotives: Words that Change the World, 1400 -1700 — Co-Editor with Stephen Spiess
Bearing a wide range of linguistic, regional, and disciplinary expertise, the volume’s twenty-five contributors traverse multiple geographies (Asia, Africa, Iberian Peninsula, Europe, & the Americas), work across fifteen languages, and span from antiquity to our current moment. Contributors advance new developments in philologies of race, in queer-, feminist-, trans*-, transnational-, and postcolonial philologies to discover the world-transforming work performed by words and to curate new ways of thinking about the crosscurrents of words-, bodies-, affects-, and knowledges-in-motion.
The Renaissance of The Earth — Founding Director
The Renaissance of the Earth revolutionizes what it means to engage the early modern past with questions about our environmental future. Through a range of interdisciplinary research collaborations, undergraduate and graduate courses, hands-on workshops, conferences, and arts programming, it puts students, artists, and scholars at the center of an interdisciplinary research project with the goal of discovering diverse avenues for creating sustainable and equitable life. Crucially, we are committed to exploring those connections that present us with the most challenging legacies: extractive colonialism, racism, forced human migration, and the asymmetries of environmental devastation around the globe.
❦ https://www.renaissanceoftheearth.com/
Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies - Director
The Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies advances research in the early modern humanities by cultivating cultures of collaboration. Our mission is to develop multicultural, diverse, and timely programming that fosters the best of interdisciplinary engagement in the humanities and forecasts its future course. We are governed by three goals: 1) to develop and disseminate cutting edge interdisciplinary research into the literatures, history, and cultures of the early modern period (ca. 1400-1700) and its global afterlives; 2) to integrate our scholarly research initiatives with the academic offerings at the University and the Five Colleges, developing and expanding both traditional curricular and experiential learning opportunities at the intersection of disciplines; 3) to generate and foster creative and educational public-facing programming that invites students and the public to explore the legacies of early modern literature, history, science, cultural, and artistic production in our world today and to mobilize this knowledge to shape more just and livable futures.
To support our mission and goals, the Center invites collaborative engagements along many fronts. The Center builds and maintains a unique collection of manuscripts, rare books, scholarly archives, and monographs, which our students and the public draw upon in the production of new scholarly and artistic creation, often working in collaborative teams to do so. We offer courses, lectures, symposia, arts programing and exhibitions that explore the inherently interdisciplinary nature of the Renaissance, from its literature, music, and art to the sciences of anatomy, botany, geology, and cartography. In so doing, artists, scholars, and students work together to bring a diversity of expertise to bear on their innovative projects. Our 28-acres serve as a “living laboratory,” which includes a historical Renaissance kitchen garden and orchard, the cultivation of which opens onto pedagogical, experiential, and research opportunities that we have developed into an ambitious, interdisciplinary research and public-engagement initiative that spans the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences (see Renaissance of the Earth, below). We also support a range of pre- professional training opportunities, graduate and undergraduate research and work-study positions, and a diversity of non-credit bearing workshops and courses for both university students and the public. In all this, we prize the un-siloing of knowledge by creating opportunities for otherwise individualized knowledge and field-specific expertise to come to bear on large-scale questions that fundamentally require interdisciplinary ways of knowing. The Center thus exemplifies the idea that interdisciplinary collaboration is key to meeting the challenges of our time.
The Anthropocene Lab — Research Team Member
At UMass Amherst, an interdisciplinary group of humanists, scientists, social scientists, and artists seek new interdisciplinary narratives about the Anthropocene in an effort to engage the deep past and shared futures, humans and non-human communities. The dynamics of the Anthropocene present fundamental challenges to traditional disciplinary silos and their capacity to understand systems and respond to crises. The way we imagine, speak or write about, or represent the Anthropocene are of critical importance at a time of climate change. What are, and how are, dominant narratives about the Anthropocene created? Which interdisciplinary practices and research agendas create better narratives?
Cross-campus “Thinking the Earth” seminars offer interested faculty and graduate students a platform to engage one of the most contested and noteworthy developments in intellectual history. ❦ https://blogs.umass.edu/anthropocenelab/
My research has been supported by:
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation | Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
The Connaught Fund | MassHumanities | Office of the Provost UMass Amherst
University of Toronto's Jackman Humanities Institute| University of Michigan's Institute for the Humanities
as well as the Huntington, Newberry, and Folger Shakespeare Libraries