Department Member, History
About
As a cultural historian, I am interested in the relationships between religious practices and other realms like medicine, natural philosophy, and the arts in late medieval and early modern England. Much of this work focuses on processes of cultural translation and transition. Indeed, my work straddles period-boundaries, disciplinary expectations, and configurations, aiming to fruitfully disrupt them. I see the late medieval and early modern as a coherent period of transition and cultural translation. My doctoral research exemplified these pursuits, as I examined how the experience and aims of religious reform in England were shaped by a pervasive and well established sensory culture and its theories. I took to task the persistent stereotypes in existing scholarship of the intellectualized Protestant versus the sensual Catholic. By placing the practicalities of ritual life in the context of medical, sacramental, and moral views on sensation, material cultural changes, and empirical methodologies, a much more complex picture of reform emerged. The results, outlined at length in my book, reveal a medieval and conservative approach to the Reformation by contemporaries, a view that alters the periodization of the Reformation itself. These interests continue to shape my work. I am currently revising a series of papers into articles, and working on a new collection of essays on the senses in the Renaissance with two colleagues. I have been commissioned to write a chapter on the senses and religion in the renaissance for a five volume cultural history of the senses. Aside from tying up the loose ends from my monograph, I have begun work on a new book project on particularity and empiricism in the English reformation.
My work at McGill has also focused on the emergent field of Digital Humanities. Here I am again drawn to issues of practice, in particular how best to manage collective and individual research interests within large scale interdisciplinary collaborative humanities research projects. This has centred on the creation of virtual research environments that mediate individual and collaborative activity. I am particularly interested in the problems of cross-calendar chronometry and entity hierarchy, as they relate to the mapping of historical networks.
Contact Information
| Address: | Making Publics Project |
