I am a medievalist interested primarily in late-medieval England. I am currently an Assistant Professor in the English programme at Memorial University of Newfoundland’s Grenfell Campus. I’m the first medievalist in the campus’s fifty-year history (!) and am excited to introduce many new courses to our expanding curriculum. 

Thus far I have taugh the school’s first Chaucer (courtly poetry) and medieval romance classes in Autumn 2022 and Winter 2023, respectively. (I am teaching the Chaucer course again in Winter 2025 and will be teaching the romance course once more in Autumn 2025.) The Autumn 2024 semester saw Grenfell’s first “Introduction to Middle English” course. In the Winter 2024 semester, I created a new course, ENGL 4701: “Literature and Devotion in the Middle Ages,” which examined saints’ lives, books of hours and other daily practices, lyrics, selections from The Wooing Group, devotional selections from Chaucer, and Pearl. 

An on-going project centres on a single manuscript, Oxford, Trinity College MS 8, also known as the Beauchamp missal. This manuscript, which belonged to Sir William Beauchamp (c. 1343 – 1411), is best known to scholars for containing the earliest exemplar of the mass for the Holy Name of Jesus. Some of my research focuses on this devotion, but the Beauchamp missal holds many wonders besides. I have also recently published two articles concerning the life of Sir William Beauchamp.

My publications include studies of Ricardian poetry (especially Chaucer and the Pearl-poet), Middle English etymologies, late-medieval dream visions (such as the poems of Charles d’Orleans), the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, and the intersection of formalism and linguistics. You can find PDFs of many of these papers on the Publications page.

I grew up in Regina, Saskatchewan, where I completed a B.A. in English literature. I moved to Wolfville, Nova Scotia, to pursue an M.A. at Acadia University. I earned my Ph.D. from McGill University in 2015. After working in literary publishing for a couple of years, I held a two-year SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies. In 2018 – 2019, I was Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediæval Studies (Toronto, Ontario). Later in 2019, I returned to Acadia University as a Henderson McCain Visiting Professor, where I collaborated with my MA supervisor, K.S. Whetter, on a pedagogical project focused on teaching Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy alongside Chaucer in undergraduate classrooms.

Prior to coming to Grenfell, I was an Assistant Professor at the Centre for the Arts in Society at Leiden University. I was part of the team teaching Philology courses, including Old and Middle English language and literature as well as the second-year History of the English Language course. In addition, I was a member of the tutor team for the International Studies programme based out of The Hague, where I assisted with the Cultural Studies and Philosophy of Science courses. I’ve also taught at Brock University’s Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Heroic and Chivalric Literature), Wilfrid Laurier University’s Brantford campus (Medieval Poetry of the Fantastic), McGill University (Poetics), and Luther College (first-year English).

You can view my CV here.