Research Interests
I am an historian of Medieval Europe with a particular emphasis on the later Middle Ages. My work primarily focuses on the late medieval martial aristocracy of England and France, including their participation in the Spanish, Italian, and Cypriot theaters of the Hundred Years War and later crusades. My research interests include narrative theory, military history, gender theory in premodern contexts, and, most of all, approaches to cultural history. I am especially interested in material culture (notably, armor and animals) and how objects appear in narratives to lend meaning to texts. My research engages with artifacts in the Royal Armouries, the Wallace Collection, and the Metropolitain Museum of Art, with alabaster tomb effigies in cathedral collections such as those of Tewkesbury and Bristol, and with codicological studies of manuscripts in the British Library and the BNF Richelieu.
I am currently at work on my first monograph, which studies the relationship between chivalric culture, knightly gender, and the material world. It traces the life cycle of medieval French and English men-at-arms from birth to death and beyond. I plan to investigate how narratives of all sorts – wrought in ink, gold-leaf, and stone – captured the agency of objects in moments of knightly self-fashioning. Ultimately this monograph seeks to question the notion of masculinity in “crisis,” and to contextualize conceptions of gender shared by arms-bearing aristocrats in the Hundred Years War, the Italian Wars, and the Wars of the Roses.
Inspired by historical texts and images, I also enjoy painting. A core goal in the classroom is to share my passion for art with my students, and we engage with all sorts of visual and material evidence.
Recent Presentations
“The End of Battle: Armor, Animals, and the Masculinity of Victory 1350-1425” SLU Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Saint Louis, MO (Summer 2025)
“Beasts and Bascinets: Masculine Self Fashioning through Armor and Animals in Late Medieval Combat” International Medieval Congress, Leeds, UK (Summer 2024)
Guest Lecture, “Martial Materiality, Masculinity, and the Expression of Knightly Identity 1350-1425” The O’Brien Conference on Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Rice University, Houston, TX (Spring 2022)
“A Versatile Steel Skin: The Representations and Roles of Armor in Late Fourteenth-Century Texts and Images” International Medieval Congress, Leeds, UK (Summer 2021)
Recent Publications
“Like a Hound Upon Its Quarry: Noble Animals as Elements of Knightly Material Culture ca.1350-1425” Comitatus 56, A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, UCLA (forthcoming Fall 2025)
Recent Painting
