RESEARCH
My research interests broadly include the history of medieval to early modern England and Scandinavia; Old English, Middle English, and Old Norse literature; medieval languages, especially Old Norse, Old English, Middle English, and medieval Latin; theories of empire and colonialism; critical race studies and critical Indigenous studies; trans* and queer theory. For a complete list of publications and research activity, see my CV.
Current Research Projects
The Postcolonial Sagas: The Politics of Failure in Late Medieval Iceland.
King Magnús Hákonarson, ÍBR 1 4to Jónsbók ; Ísland, 1681
My current monograph project addresses an omission in histories of premodern colonialism: the period after Iceland became a dependency of the Kingdom of Norway in 1262/1264. Through an interdisciplinary examination of Old Norse-Icelandic Íslendingasögur typically dated from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, this project suggests that these so-called postclassical sagas express opposition to a nascent colonial relationship between Iceland and its Norwegian sovereigns not through polemics or outright resistance, but through the strategic expression of negative affects in rewritings of the political past.
Thinking Trans in Medieval Fennoscandia 1200-1500.
Grettisfærsla, AM 556 a 4to, Eggertsbók, Ísland, c. 1475-1499.
I am simultaneously working on a second book project, charts how concepts of ‘trans*ness’ were defined, developed, and deployed medieval Fennoscandia (including Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat) and Sápmi, the traditional lands of the Sámi), through an interdisciplinary and intersectional examination of textual and material evidence. In dialogue with recent work on premodern gender and race, a central contention of this project is that ‘trans*ness’ was conceptualised in Old Norse literature alongside emergent concepts of racial difference and Indigeneity.
Recent Publications
Sufficient Tragedy: Masculinity as Cruel Optimism in Beowulf
This article offers a new framework for approaching masculinity in Beowulf by suggesting that masculinity is dependent upon what affect theorist Lauren Berlant (2011) calls “cruel optimism”: when an individual pursues something that is an obstacle to their flourishing. This article traces how Beowulf constructs a “masculine economy” sustained by a cruel optimistic attachment to an ideal and unobtainable masculinity, taking the flyting contest between Unferð and Beowulf (ll. 499–558) as an illustrative example of how homosocial competitions that promise masculinity are just as likely to unravel it. This article then examines Beowulf’s defeat and death (ll. 2711b–2820), to demonstrate that failure is intrinsic to cruel optimism. By examining the subversive possibilities of what Jack Halberstam calls “queer failure”, this reading raises questions about whether Beowulf the poem criticises and Beowulf the man refuses the cruelty of masculine striving.
Published in English Studies (2024)
Queer Indigenous Relationality in Finnboga saga ramma
This article grapples with the uneasy intimacy between medieval, Indigenous, and queer studies through a reconsideration of Norse-Indigenous relations in Finnboga saga ramma [Saga of Finnbogi the Strong] (c. 1300–50), an understudied Íslendingasaga [Icelandic family saga]. I test the limits of what the strategic anachronisms of “Indigeneity” and “queer” can accomplish by turning to Jodi Byrd and, more specifically, their reading of Samuel Delaney’s 1967 science fiction story “Aye and Gomorrah” in order to theorize how Finnboga saga appropriates Indigeneity to potentiate intimacies that run counter to an internalized sense of an ideal masculinity and sexuality. I will begin by briefly considering how medievalists tend to approach depictions of the Sámi within medieval texts to gesture to the potential of a queer, Indigenous turn within Old Norse-Icelandic studies. From there, I will unfold how Finnboga saga may intersect “Indigeneity” with “queer” by situating this text in the context of a medieval Icelandic imaginary that sees a reciprocity between gender nonconformance and racialized bodies. This reading seeks to contribute to the dismantling of persistent assumptions that attestations of Indigeneity are inconsequential in Old Norse-Icelandic literature and also to demonstrate the potential of a critical turn in medieval studies that is both Indigenous and queer.
Published in Speculum (2024)