[Article draft from 2020: very of its mid-lockdown moment, but unlikely to be revisiting this, so here it is!]
This article examines one of the most familiar elements of digital interfaces: the zoom tool. By tracing the conceptual, technical, and material histories of
zooming from the late Middle Ages to the present day, it demonstrates how…[Read more]

Article draft from Summer 2021; very unlikely to be revisiting/revising this, so here it is!

This essay argues that recent work on affordances provides a potentially valuable theoretical tool for thinking across the history of the medieval manuscript, from the making and remaking of the codex to the intricacies of its digital remediation. It…[Read more]

William Muggins, an impoverished but highly literate weaver-poet, lived and wrote in London at the turn of the seventeenth century, when few of his contemporaries could even read. A Weaver-Poet and the Plague’s microhistorical approach uses Muggins’s life and writing, in which he articulates a radical vision of a commonwealth founded on labor and…[Read more]

This article examines The Tempest in light of artists’ renderings of the play in New Orleans, reflecting on anti-Black racism in Shakespeare’s play and in the Deep South.

This essay argues that Thomas Tusser’s popular book of georgic verse, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, offered a counter to developments in courtly poetry under Elizabeth I. Critics have long disparaged Tusser’s poetry as naïvely rustic, but Tusser was not an uneducated peasant who happened to pick up enough literacy to pen a book of poem…[Read more]