Research

My research focuses on representations of pre- and post-mortem punitive spaces in Old and Middle English literature. My book project explores the many features that medieval penal spaces, such as Purgatory, Limbo, and Hell have in common with earthly carceral spaces, and the ways in which marginal figures—such as dead pagans, excommunicants, restless ghosts, and even devils—in medieval narratives engage with those spaces. I argue that in the Middle Ages, prison inmates and the restless dead were of liminal status, and their permeable confines occupied the center of each medieval community’s social, economic, and spiritual landscape. Punitive measures were a means of correction and rehabilitation, and liminal figures were reintegrated after a relatively short period of punishment. Over time, however, as both religious and secular penal practices evolved, the connection between purgation and imprisonment became more attenuated, and liminal figures moved to the periphery of the medieval imaginary. I illustrate this point by using an online time-lapse mapping tool to chart the movement of gaols, prisons, churches, and graveyards from the heart of each medieval community to the periphery, demonstrating that as these punitive spaces shifted from center to margin, the once-strong association between prison and Purgatory began to diminish and was eventually lost.

Publications

“Asceticism in Old English and Syriac Soul and Body Narratives.” Humanities, (accepted for special issue).

“if (not “Quantize, Click, and Conclude”){DigitalMethodsInMedievalStudies();}.” Meeting the Medieval in a Digital World, ed. Matthew Davis. Arc Humanities Press, 2018. 27-44.

“Two New Approaches to Exploring Monstrous Landscapes in Beowulf and Blickling Homily XVII.” Essays in Medieval Studies,vol. 31, 2015, pp. 165-181. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/ems.2015.0009

“Early Modern OCR Project (eMOP) at Texas A&M University: Using Aletheia to Train Tesseract.” ACM Document Engineering Proceedings, September 2013. 23-26.

Rev. of Debates in Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold, in Information and Culture: A Journal of History, with Laura Mandell, et al, March 2013.

Collaborative and Online Projects

Beowulf by All trans. lines 931-949, Stanford Text Technologies, eds. Elaine Treharne and Jean Abbott. Punctum Books, (forthcoming in 2020).

SPEAR (Syriac Persons, Events, and Relations), contributing author as a part of Syriaca.org: The Syriac Reference Portal http://syriaca.org.

Works in Progress

“Modeling a Factoid Prosopography with TEI and Linked Data.” (Submitted to the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative), co-authored with Daniel Schwartz and Nathan Gibson.

“Formulas as a Test for Verse-Medial Extrametrical Syllables in Old English Poetry.” Article in progress, co-authoring with Britt Mize.