EDUCATION
DPhil in English
New College, University of Oxford
2019–2023
MSt. in Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies
New College, University of Oxford
2019
B.A. English, magna cum laude
Writing Concentration; Distinction in the Major
Yale University
2016
Academic Work
My academic work connects the medieval and early modern periods with the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries by following the trail of the children’s adaptation. It’s a curious literary object: it’s not “original” yet also explicitly derivative; it’s not quite children’s literature, but explicitly not adult; it’s derided as infantile by academia yet responds intimately to the same texts that forged English literature as a discipline. What’s more, the children’s adaptation a specifically feminized product: not only is adaptation seen as a feminine response to a text, but the vast majority of the people writing children’s adaptations are women, many of whom are mothers.
My dissertation explores the treatment of sexuality in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare, which is intertwined with questions of poetic identity, nationalism, authorship, and hermeneutic justice. Both Chaucer and Shakespeare are considered “fathers” of English literature in their own ways. My dissertation asks: How and why are these authors adapted for children? How do these adaptations deal with sex in its many forms? How are they complicit in policing the boundaries of “childhood,” a category that interacts in complex ways with gender as well as race, class, and ability?
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