Research
Positioned at the intersection of critical Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, and early English studies, my research takes a place-based approach to understanding the legacies of settler colonialism. In my dissertation, my archive consists of nineteenth-century settler documentations of New York State (e.g., paintings, journals, pseudo-histories, maps and surveys, etc.) with Old English and Latin sources from early medieval England to show how the rhetorics of dispossession are being honed in early medieval England and replicated and adapted in New York State contexts.
In my personal time, I research and record my family’s histories. I am thankful to continue this work that my maternal grandmother and many paternal aunties have been doing for decades!
Publications
Article
with Dusti C. Bridges, “Anglo-Saxonism and Indigenous Dispossession: Land-Grab Universities and the Emergence of Medieval Studies,” in the Medieval Academy of America Centennial Themed Issue, “Medieval Studies and Its Institutions,” ed. Roland Betancourt and Karla Mallette, Speculum 100:1 (January 2025): 46-78. doi.org/10.1086/733212.
Abstract:
Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone’s (2020) report on the Morrill Act of 1862 tied the founding and funding of “Land-grab” universities, including several institutions key to the development of medieval studies in the United States, to the forceful dispossession of Indigenous peoples. When this history of active policies of Indigenous displacement, genocidal campaigns, and corrupt negotiations is considered in light of the growth of medieval studies in American institutions, this context brings forth the uncomfortable settler colonial association of the active erasure of Indigenous histories and their replacement with a Western medieval past. Motivated by the development of American Anglo-Saxonism and further bolstered by an academic focus on American medieval lineages, medieval studies profited from and contributed to Indigenous erasure both tangibly and intellectually, as its intellectual contributions to the American state and the academy became a tool of settler colonialism.
Article
with Jordan Chauncy, “Settler Fantasies and Queer Disruptions: A Nonbinary Reading of Gerald’s Wolves,” invited contribution to the “Medieval Trans Natures” special issue ed. Aylin Malcolm and Nat Rivkin, Medieval Ecocriticisms 4 (2024): 17-38. doi.org/10.32773/EBNH3284.
Abstract:
This article offers a nonbinary reading of Gerald of Wales’ twelfth-century Topographia Hibernica (Topography of Ireland) to examine the ways in which the text’s Ossory wolf episode both imposes and undermines its own imposed colonial taxonomies. Through a relational analysis that brings together Indigenous studies and trans theory, this article makes legible the Ossory wolves’ queer disruptions and understands such disruptions as forms of Irish resistance and survivance to the colonizing forces of the Anglo-Normans. Ultimately, we argue for a nonbinary reading of the Topographia that resists taxonomy–even hybridity–and insists on fluidity and plurality.
Chapter
with Tarren Andrews, Emily Bange, Christopher Fletcher, Haley Guepet, Alexis Howlett, Alex Lee, Veronica Mendali, Natalie Robertson, and Benjamin Weil, “Reflections on ‘Thinking and Working Beyond the Medieval Archive,’” in Beyond Medieval Archives, ed. Carl Kears and Fran Brooks, Forthcoming.
Abstract:
This chapter critically engages the ways in which archival research is naturalized in medieval studies and, most significantly, how students of medieval studies across the hierarchy of the profession can use this process of normalization to assist efforts well outside the field, like those of tribal governments seeking federal recognition in the United States. In total, this contribution hopes to approach the question of the archive perpendicularly, both in form and content, to explore the many ways in which the capital “A” Archive maintains a spectral presence in our thinking, writing, and collaborating, and creatively consider what we might do with that presence in the face of a changing landscape of medieval studies and global relations.