My research interrogates premodern conceptual categories such as nature, the body, and most recently, periodization and time. At the same time, I am interested in how these past constructions continue to resonate in contemporary values, aesthetics, and social structures.

My most recent book, Acts of Care: Regulating Women in Late Medieval Health (Cornell, 2021), explores the nexus of gender, caregiving, and medical epistemology in the Middle Ages. I am also the author of Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Christianity (Cornell, 2014) and co-editor (with Sharon Strocchia) of Gender, Health, and Healing, 1250-1550 (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) and (with Lynn M. Thomas and Kristin Burnett) the “Health, Healing, and Caring” special issue of Gender & History (Fall 2021). In 2021, I joined Shazia Jagot and Julie Orlemanski as co-editor in chief of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies.

My research explores medieval performance traditions across the French Atlantic. I am interested in the temporal entanglement of troubadours, traiteurs, passion plays, and Catholic processions, and the role of these performances in French philologists’ efforts to furnish a textual record of orality; I also consider how that textual record, the corpus of medieval French poetry and drama, continues to shape our imagining of the Middle Ages.

I teach graduate and undergraduate courses in the history of medieval medicine, gender relations in medieval Europe, late medieval religious and cultural history, and historical methods.

Selected Publications

Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health (Cornell University Press, 2021).

Gender, Health, and Healing, 1250-1550, co-edited with Sharon Strocchia (Amsterdam University Press, 2020). Co-winner of the Collaborative Project Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender.

Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Christianity (Cornell University Press, 2014).