My research in early modern studies has focused on political theory, colonialism, the literatures of travel and diaspora, and materialist studies of class, labor, and capitalism.  My second book monograph—Agents Beyond the State, on the literary production of English state agents—was published by Oxford University Press in 2020.  My earlier publications include a monograph (England’s Internal Colonies), a critical edition of an early modern text (Norden’s The Surveyor’s Dialogue), and a co-edited essay collection (Early Modern Drama in Performance).

One of the abiding concerns of my research has been to analyze the ways that literary and cultural expressions of English national identity are inextricably tied to histories of colonialism, class relations, and global capital.  My first book, England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern Colonialism, was published in Palgrave’s series in Early Modern Cultural Studies.  It examined early modern colonialism in the context of labor relations and emerging practices of domestic and global capital, and drew on the critical framework of internal colonialism in order to address the mutually constitutive histories of domestic class relations and overseas commercial and colonial development.

Following the publication of my first book, I was commissioned to edit John Norden’s The Surveyor’s Dialogue (1618) for Ashgate’s series in Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity.  Norden’s text, which has been a central point of reference in critical discussions of the agrarian roots of English capitalism, is also a fascinating case-study for histories of science, literary professionalism, and political ecology because of its insights into the effects of social change on the human and physical landscape of rural England.

Over the past few years, I have written several essays that are not part of my book-length projects on a range of topics: the literary and cultural afterlife of Sir Francis Drake in the seventeenth century; exiled Catholic political writers and diasporic nationalism; comedy as a generic template for representing diplomacy; the critical history of studies of early modern labor; and Venice as a site for intelligence gathering.  In addition, I co-edited an essay collection with Darlene Farabee and Bradley Ryner, Early Modern Drama in Performance (2014), a festschrift for our mentor Lois Potter.

My second book monograph, Agents Beyond the State: the Writings of English Travelers, Soldiers, and Diplomats in Early Modern Europe, was published with Oxford UP in 2020.  The project examines the early modern state in terms of the literary and social practices through which it was constituted.  The state was defined, I argue, not through the elaboration of theoretical models of sovereignty but rather as an effect of the literary and professional lives of its extraterritorial representatives.  I examine state agents in terms of their material practices of writing, networks of association, modes of affect and sociability, and formulations of agency and critique.  My analysis separates the history of the state from national culture in order to emphasize the transnational contexts of early modern state formation.  I focus on the textual networks and literary production of three groups of extraterritorial agents: travelers and intelligence agents, mercenaries, and diplomats.  Many of the agents discussed in my project were among the earliest professional authors in early modern England, figures who possessed dual careers as state agents and literary writers.  As they entered the realm of print and addressed a reading public, they transformed models of the state in the process, rendering its administration and theoretical preconditions as subject matter for public debate and analysis.