I work on the literature and culture of Tudor and early Stuart England. My main expertise is in materialism (in its Marxist, ancient, and "new materialist" manifestations); I am also engaged by problems of word and image, religiosity, and humanist learning.
My current project looks at the scholarly and poetic project of "Renaissance"--the rebirth of the past in the present--as a scene of tumultuous feeling, both positive and negative, and construes both "feeling" and "past" in terms that are as materialist and sensuous as I can push them to be. The emotional patterns that have emerged as central to this investigation trace a strange set of interactions among envy, charity, glory, and shame in Renaissance approaches to matters from the medieval and classical past.
