Education
Teaching Interests
In addition to teaching in the English Department, I am also affiliated with the Women's and Gender Studies Program, where I teach classes on gender and sexuality.
I ground my pedagogy in two key tenets: I endeavor to bring to life the exceptional and unfamiliar qualities of premodern literature while simultaneously fostering an awareness as to how texts on the syllabus are part of an intellectual history that underpins our contemporary moment. This is a balancing act!
I want students to account for historical difference but not lose sight of how early modern literature continues to resonate today. In the classroom, I facilitate an informed engagement with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts by providing a foundation in literary methodology; by examining contemporary performances of premodern drama, such as Shakespeare; and by encouraging students to bring their own interests and personal histories into discussion. My courses openly consider how to approach our own alienation from the ideologies shaping the texts on the syllabus, and we discuss as a class what our objectives are in reading canonical works. My main goal is that my students’ deeper understanding of literature equips them with a skillset for critical engagement both in future courses and outside the classroom. But I also, more simply put, want to encourage a love of literature and language in my students.
Research, Scholarship or Creative/Artistic Interests
In my scholarship, I bring together early modern literature, medical science and critical theory to rethink both the materiality and psychology of embodiment.
My current book project uncovers the literary aftermath of the Sweating Sickness, a plague that exploded across England in the sixteenth century. Following multiple outbreaks, early modern authors turn attention not only to the moral status of sensible perspiration but also to the inherent intimacy of illness. Writers in the period — from Spenser to Shakespeare to Milton — struggle with sweat’s ethical implications: the fluid is repeatedly invoked in theological debates, with “the sweat of the brow” understood as the primary evidence of embodied postlapsarian life. And yet the substance also emerges in their writing as a rarefied ornament, what Spenser glosses as an “Orient perle.” This process of aestheticization elides the particularities of living and laboring in a body by insisting that the body in crisis can have erotic appeal. Poets and prose writers, I argue, turn to sweat to redescribe a narrative of what bodies are desirable and how identity is made legible.
Professional Website
https://muhlenberg.academia.