I study early modern English literature and am especially interested in two, interrelated questions. First, what did "English" and "literature" mean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and how have those meanings changed in the centuries after? Second, how might our answers to that question reshape the ways we read and think about English literature today? I've written two books, one on the emergence of the idea of English literature and the other on the four-hundred-year-long struggle between readers and Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and am at work on a book about learning to read in early modern England. I live in Hamden with my husband and three kids. I love to read, like to cook, and am spectacularly unathletic. I go to Mass at St. Thomas More Chapel and am always up for talking about religion.
