Research

My research focuses on representations of pre- and post-mortem punitive spaces in Old and Middle English literature. In my dissertation, “Purgatory and Prison: Punitive Spaces in Old and Middle English Literature,” I explore what medieval penal spaces, such as Purgatory, Limbo, and Hell share 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

“if (not “Quantize, Click, and Conclude”) {Digital Methods In Medieval Studies();}.” Meeting the Medieval in a Digital World, ed. Matthew Davis. Amsterdam University Press. Forthcoming 2018. MS 20 pp.

“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.