I have taught in the Department of English at Yale University since 2000. Before that, I studied at Harvard University (A.B.), Cambridge University (M. Phil.), and UCLA (Ph.D.). My interests include Old and Middle English literatures, manuscript studies, text/image relations, and the history of the book. I teach both undergraduate and graduate courses in all of these subjects, and I am currently serving as Chair of the English Department.

My research examines the cultures of medieval reading as they are preserved in manuscripts. My first book, Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England (Chicago, 2007), shows that the format of a late-medieval miscellany reveals surprising connections between the private reading of a meditative lyric and the public performance of civic drama. More recently, Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022) offers a method for manuscript study based inductively on a dozen case studies. I am currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled The Book of Hours in English Literary History.