PhD University of California, Santa Barbara

 

Areas of Interest & Expertise

• Early American Literature

• Early Caribbean Literature

• 18th-Century British Literature 

Recent Courses Taught

Graduate Seminars: 

• Early Caribbean Literature

• Crime and Vice in the Early Atlantic World

• Redrawing the Boundaries of Early American Literature

• Early American Borderlands

Upper Division:

• • Island As Text: Grenada (study abroad course taught in Grenada)

  • Literature and Culture of the Caribbean (study abroad course taught in Trinidad and Tobago)

  • City as Text: Berlin, Germany (Honors Seminar)

Selected Publications

Books:

• Buccaneers and Privateers: The Story of the English Sea Rover, 1675-1725. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012; paperback edition in 2014. 

• Heroes of Empire: The British Colonial Protagonist in America, 1596-1764. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004. 

Recent Articles:

• “The Early Literary Evolution of the Notorious Pirate Henry Avery.” Special issue on Pirates in English Literature. Guest editors Claire Jowitt and Manushag N. Powell. Humanities 9, issue no. 1, article 6 (2020).

• “Beyond Bonny and Read: Blackbeard’s Bride and Other Women in Caribbean Piracy Narratives.” In Literary Histories of the Early Anglophone Caribbean: Islands in the Stream. Ed. Nicole N. Aljoe, Brycchan Carey, and Thomas W. Krise. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan (2018), 125-145.

• “John Gay’s Polly (1729), Bernard Mandeville, and the Critique of Empire.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Volume 46 (2017).

Selected Conference Presentations

• “Captain Avery and the Indian Princess.” South Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. St. Augustine, FL. February 2020. 

• “Henry Avery: The Atlantic World Pirate and the Construction of Civil Society.” Society for Early Americanists. Eugene, OR, February 2019.

• Invited Keynote Speaker, Conference on “Liberty and Death: Pirates and Zombies in Atlantic Modernity,” Internationales Forshungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften, Kunstuniversität, Austria. January 2018.

• “Edward (Ned) Low as Hostis Humani Generis,” Society for Caribbean Studies, University of Essex, Colchester, UK. July 2017.

Awards and Recognition

• President of OSU's Phi Beta Kappa chapter, Fall 2019-

• Editorial Board Member, Caribbeana: The Journal of Early Caribbean Society, 2014 - 

• President, Early Caribbean Society, Summer 2017-Spring 2019.

Current Research

• Piracy and Privateering

• Early Caribbean Literature

• Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World History