Faculty

Biography

My research explores the social and intellectual histories of gender and sexuality in medieval Europe, focusing particularly on the role of law and natural philosophy in shaping the lived experience of identity and desire. My first book, Unclean Beasts: Sex, Animality, and the Invention of Heteronormativity in the Late Middle Ages (under contract with University of Pennsylvania Press) examines how the radical transformation in conceptions of the natural world and the human body between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries fostered new ways of understanding sexuality. I argue that this new bio-psychological model of sexuality was the foundation for a comprehensive ideological system of regulation over sexual behaviour; the roots of heteronormativity as we know it today.

I previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Trinity College Dublin, leading the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions-funded project ‘Sexuality in Crisis: The Black Death and Social Control in Fourteenth-Century England’. This project explored the records of the English ecclesiastical courts and sought to assess the extent to which the exertion of institutional power over sexual behaviour transformed during a century of multiple environmental and political catastrophes.

I'm also interested in the social history of trans people in global premodernity. My research aims to bring trans studies into conversation with histories of law, medicine and other fields in order to shed light on the lived experience of transness in medieval and early modern societies. My article, 'The Trans Middle Ages: Incorporating Transgender and Intersex Studies into the History of Medieval Sexuality' (2023), is a preliminary attempt to think through some of the methodological challenges of this approach.

Courses Offered (subject to change)

• HIST 124:  Everyday Life in Medieval Europe
• HIST 318W/418:  Gender and Sexuality in the Late Medieval World

Selected Publications

• “Orientation and Anachronism in the High Middle Ages: Sexuality in Bernard of Cluny’s De contemptu mundi (c. 1144).” Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes – Journal of Medieval and Humanistic Studies 1, no.51 (2026): 105-124.
• “Sexuality in Crisis: Sodomy and Plague in the Fourteenth-Century English Church.” Journal of Medieval History 52, no.2 (2026): 253-272.
• “Bestiality, Confession and Social Control in Late Medieval England.” in Animal Husbandry: Bestiality in Medieval Culture, edited by Jacqueline A. Stuhmiller, pp.87–105 (Brill, 2025)
• “Cautious Lion, Canny Woman: Queer Animality in La Response du bestiaire.” Medieval Ecocriticisms 4 (2024): 57–76.
• “The Trans Middle Ages: Incorporating Transgender and Intersex Studies into the History of Medieval Sexuality.” English Historical Review 138, no.593 (2023): 933–951.
• “Monstrous Hybrids, Maternal Sin, and the Concept of Species in Nicole Oresme’s De causis mirabilium.” in Gender and the ‘Natural’ Environment in the Middle Ages, edited by Theresa L. Tyers and Patricia Skinner, pp.248–272 (University of Wales Press, 2023).
• “The trial of Thomas Frogbrook: bestiality and the law in an early sixteenth-century English rural community.” Historical Research 95, no.270 (2022): 506–521.

Awards and Honors

• Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowship. Trinity College Dublin, 2024-26. Project title: “Sexuality in Crisis: The Black Death and Social Control in Fourteenth-Century England.”
• Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities, University of York, 2016-20. Project title: “Representations of animality and sexuality in late medieval thought and culture.”