Areas of Specialization

English language studies, history of the English language, late medieval literature

Activities and Interests

I am interested, most broadly, in the ways that speakers and writers have used and shaped the English language to meet their changing needs. My research is based in the history of the English language, and uses methodology from historical pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and stylistics. My 2011 book, Quoting Speech in Early English, joins linguistic and literary studies to investigate methods of marking reported speech in late medieval English. I am currently researching the intersection of linguistic and scribal strategies for textual organization in late Middle English devotional texts. Other research and teaching interests include language ideologies, language and community, corpus linguistics, language and gender, the changing linguistic landscape in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and Middle English language and literature.