简介

My scholarly work in European Renaissance literature has come to focus particularly on age studies or “literary gerontology”: how old age was understood, misunderstood, and depicted in early modernity, amid the intergenerational politics that shaped period attitudes. My latest book, Constituting Old Age in Early Modern English Literature, from Queen Elizabeth to King Lear, contests traditional presumptions that late life was then dismissed as little more than a time of withdrawal and preparation for death, through close rereading of such Elizabethan authors as Spenser, Sidney, Ralegh, Shakespeare, Donne, and the queen herself. I am in the process of extending these findings into the subsequent reigns of the Stuart monarchs, a time when old age would attain even greater prominence in literary, philosophical, and scientific discourse even as it confronted a growing tide of ageist prejudice. An abiding interest in lyric poetry’s societal contexts, which steered my first book Policy in Love: Lyric and Public in Ovid, Petrarch, and Shakespeare, also informs another current book project, tentatively titled “Poems for Men,” on how male English poets of the seventeenth century found themselves obliged to conceive their art’s “masculine line” anew in the presence of an emerging company of publishing female writers.