Research

My scholarship focuses on interdisciplinary questions related to how media shape the ways in which individuals make sense of and explain their world. Whether today, with digital media platforms proliferating, or in early modern Europe, which faced its own forms of “information overload,” the medium through which content was read, listened to, or viewed has always been central to understanding its meaning. My research also addresses a corollary of this: how individuals have developed the tools to navigate complex media cultures.

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My dissertation, entitled “Uncertain Presents, Unstable Pasts: Rethinking History during the British Civil Wars, 1638 – 1660,” examines the way history was written, read, and argued about during the mid-seventeenth century civil wars in Britain and Ireland. I develop the argument that the media environment of the mid-seventeenth century encouraged readers throughout the English-speaking world to approach history in new ways and, ultimately, develop a more causal sense of the past. I argue that a variety of developments during this period, such as the rise of serial printed news and innovations in the recycling of pamphlet literature from earlier moments of crisis, led to a broad reshaping of how individuals thought about history and their place in relation to it. My dissertation is based on extensive archival research in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the United States, drawing on commonplace books, journals, and a range of printed materials.

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Other works include an essay on bookselling practices in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake (Winter 2022, Early American Studies) as well as another on the relationship between engraving and literacy in 1720s London through the prism of a manuscript recipe book located at Penn’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts.