I work at the intersection of Early Modern literature, Computational and Digital Humanities (with a focus on Natural Language Processing methodologies), and the ethics and the economic history of empire. My research spans traditional and computational methodologies to reconstruct how contested conceptions of desire shaped understandings of rational action in seventeenth-century literary and commercial culture. My work draws from an archive that includes traditional literary works, such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Ben Jonson’s plays, theological and pastoral works, including John Donne’s sermons and William Gouge’s domestic manual, as well as historical records that lend themselves to statistical treatment, such as the civil and demographic records of the Virginia and Bermuda Companies. At Duke, I teach courses on Natural Language Processing, Early Modern literature, and the history of commercial and colonial global expansion.
