Biography
I am originally from New York in the United States, but moved to the UK to study at the University of Oxford, where I completed a BA (1st Class) in 2018 and an MPhil (with Distinction) in 2020. I then completed a PhD at Durham University under the supervision of Prof. Alec Ryrie and with the support of a Durham Doctoral Studentship, which I was awarded in 2023. During my PhD I also held a Student Fellowship at the Wittenberg Center for Reformation Studies in Germany. My doctoral research focused on the emergence of evangelical (i.e. Protestant) reformism in Cambridge between 1520 and 1540, a period in which numerous reformers central to the English Reformation (including Thomas Bilney, Hugh Latimer, Robert Barnes, Myles Coverdale, John Frith, and Thomas Cranmer) all clustered in that university. Emphasizing the experimental nature of evangelical theology in this early period, prior to the erection of fixed confessional boundaries, I examined continuities between evangelical and Catholic reformism, fraternization across the dubious border between 'magisterial' and 'radical' reformations, the belief among early reformers in doctrines (such as psychopannychism) which would come in subsequent generations to be condemned by both Catholics and Protestants alike, and the political radicalism of early English reformers, later erased for the purpose of claiming them as the ancestors of a state church.In October of 2023 I came to Ireland and joined the University of Limerick as Postdoctoral Researcher in Early Modern History, working on the Irish Research Council funded project 'Malcontents: Order and Disorder in the Early Modern World of Learning', investigating the social and cultural history of deviance and conflict at universities in the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire from 1500 to 1800, which is led by Dr Richard Kirwan.