About Me

I recently earned my Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia, where I focused on medieval English literature and digital humanities. My scholarly interests are alliterative verse, textual criticism, scribal practices and textual transmission in medieval manuscripts, and depictions of the medieval world in current popular culture (e.g. Robin Hood and King Arthur). My dissertation is entitled “The Siege of Jerusalem: An Electronic Archive and Hypertext Edition.” It is an electronic archive of the nine surviving manuscripts witnesses of an anonymous fourteenth-century alliterative poem, and comprises editions of each of them linked to images of all extant manuscript leaves. Working on my dissertation naturally led me to visit a number of rare book and manuscript rooms in the US and UK, and also led to me wondering how my digital data would be stored and cared for. I soon became convinced that my work and the digital surrogates of the manuscript leaves that I had created were in much greater peril than the centuries-old codices I had been handling, and decided that the CLIR fellowship provides a wonderful opportunity to address this and other pressing issues of digital scholarship and librarianship. I am a Virginia native and currently reside in Maryland with my wife Jennifer, a graduate student at the University of Maryland. In addition to my academic interests I have a great many other interests, passions, and hobbies. Chief among these are music of all types and an obsession with the New York Mets — I am certain they will win the World Series this year!