My first monograph, Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Palgrave, 2009) was completed with the support of a year-long Barbara Thom Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Huntington Library and won the 2009 Sarah A. Whaley Book Award from the National Women’s Studies Association.  Investigating texts by a wide range of canonical and non-canonical authors, such as William Shakespeare, Hannah Woolley, Thomas Heywood, Anne Clifford, and others, I consider several types of work—including service, wetnursing, and housework—that changed significantly during the seventeenth century, generating new literary formulations of women’s economic, political, and religious authority. I argue that fictional narratives about working women serve a crucial social function, namely to construe and define the limits of female authority within the shifting and contested labor economy of early modern England..

My most recent book, The Dynamics of Inheritance on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge University Press, 2015), brings together my interests in gender studies, literary forms and genres, and the interrelationship between early modern literature and the social and economic climate in which it was produced.  Supported by a year-long NEH Fellowship from the Newberry Library, The Dynamics of Inheritance offers a new understanding of how the theater, England’s most vibrant cultural institution in the Renaissance, shaped attitudes about primogeniture, one of the country’s most longstanding economic systems.  Moving from the end of the sixteenth century to the early Restoration, spanning dramatic genres from tragedy to city comedy, and considering well-known plays such as Ben Jonson’s Volpone and neglected ones such as John Fletcher’s Monsieur Thomas, I argue that in negotiating the discrepancies between the presumed (and largely theoretical) stability of primogeniture and the social, economic, and geographic fluidity increasingly necessary to England’s economy, the theater helped imagine new models of socioeconomic interaction and new forms of genealogical knowledge-making.  By investigating dramatic representations of troubled patrimony and the rhetorical and dramaturgical strategies playwrights used to interpret the idiosyncrasies within England’s system of patrilineage, I demonstrate that in repeatedly enacting a human drama that perforates the ideal of patrilineal order, the theater productively estranges normative legal postures, articulating new relationships between family, wealth, and dramatic fiction.  Early modern drama, in other words, helped to reimagine the very methods and agents through which patrilineal order could be construed.  In tracing this process, The Dynamics of Inheritance demonstrates Renaissance drama’s previously unacknowledged contribution to the complex and often contradictory discourse of English inheritance.