I am a lover of word, image, and sound, a scholar of literature and cultural history, a writer, an educator, and a singer-songwriter. Much of my life, both personal and professional, has been spent in devotion to words and images – written, spoken, and sung. As a scholar, I research their historical contexts and the individuals and worlds to which they point. As a writer, I draw on them to create characters, voices, and imagined realities. As a singer-songwriter, I join my love of them to that of soulful expression and a deeply rooted passion for music. I enjoy studying, exploring, imagining, creating, and giving access to other worlds, both historical and fictional. Through my academic and creative work, be it writing, teaching, speaking, advising, or music, I aim to shine a light and illuminate, to meet people where they are at and take them deeper, further, or higher, and to positively enchant, entrance, or elevate.

Mine has been a life touched by mystery, both the joy and the pain of close encounters with the extremes of human nature and experience, from exquisite beauty to existential threat. This has left me with a profound and abiding fascination with the numinous and the invisible forces that shape our lives as well as with meaning and the matter of how we make it, where we seek it, and how it changes (or ought to) in and with time. Many interests flow from this into my work: how words, images, and sounds convey experience and help us to access and navigate the depths of existence; how voice mediates authenticity, power, and presence, and how it serves as an instrument of purpose, intent, and connection; what impact the stories we tell about ourselves, our experiences, and our endeavors have on the quality of our life; how we understand and negotiate the relations between self and other, self and the world; what it means to create and to be inspired. Important themes in my work include imagination, consciousness, and creativity.

My greatest sources of joy outside of learning, writing, teaching, speaking, and music, have been playing with my dogs, contemplating human experience and big life questions at the crossroads of here and there / then and now, and engaging in energizing repartee and meaningful conversation.

I dream of a kinder, wiser, and more compassionate world.

Biography

I am a professor in the humanities at Stanford University. After completing my doctorate at the University of Toronto, I conducted research as a scholarly fellow in the Department of History at Harvard University and at the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies at Victoria University in the University of Toronto, where I designed and taught early modern cultural history courses and lectured on Italian language and literature. I have dedicated many years to the study of languages, literatures, the arts, and music.

With the lyric at its center, my interdisciplinary research on early modern Italy sits at the intersection of history, literature, music, philosophy, religion, science, and the visual arts. It aims to elucidate early modern experiences, expressions, and conceptions of self and of the world. Though I specialize in the wondrous realms of early modern Italy, the synchronicities of academic life and graduate advising have led me to work in other areas further afield, including modern and contemporary literature, Enlightenment prose, and migration history. I remain open to new and interesting projects that cross my path.

An award-winning scholar and educator, I have participated in a number of international conferences as a speaker, organizer, moderator, and round table discussant. Invited in North America and overseas to present my work, I have given talks to both scholarly and general audiences. I have also consulted on special projects in film and art, and I have been interviewed for print, digital, and video media.

Teaching language, literature, culture, and history has both furthered and fueled my writing. I have taught in English, French, and Italian; in North America and Europe; in scholastic, academic, and corporate settings; in group and one-on-one contexts. This work has greatly stimulated my creativity as a writer and as a songwriter over the years. My academic and creative work has been complemented by leadership positions I have assumed along the way. I have served as the managing editor of an academic journal. I currently serve on the editorial board for academic journals and book series in my field.

In 2023, I received a Dean’s Distinguished Teaching Award from the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. For my research, I was designated William H. & Frances Green Faculty Fellow in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University for the 2024-2025 academic year.

Projects

My primary scholarly contributions have centered on Michelangelo, lyric poetry, and the literary and religious culture of medieval and early modern Italy. By examining the central elements of early modern devotion, such as prayer, lauda singing, the contemplation of religious images, and lay religious sociability, I have offered through my published work a more nuanced understanding of Michelangelo’s spirituality and how it functioned. This work is reflected in my first book, Michelangelo’s Christian Mysticism: Spirituality, Poetry, and Art in Sixteenth-Century Italy, and in more recent essays and articles.

I have three books of scholarly non-fiction in progress at this time:

The Space Between: Poetics of Piety in Early Modern Italy considers the ways in which male and female poets of the introspective devotional lyric engaged the Word in text, image, and imagination in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and reveals an incarnational cultural project rooted in an interstitial mode of existence: a condition of being and an experience of relating to self, divine, and world in ‘between spaces’ within and without that reflect the emergence of a new conception of selfhood.

A study of consciousness and its representations in Michelangelo and interrogations by him, Michelangelo and the Knowing Self examines the poet-artist’s textual and visual production and his understanding of the self and the world through the prism of a specifically Christian phenomenology to illuminate Michelangelo’s worldview, production, and praxes.

A transhistorical and transcultural study through text and image of the conceptual entanglement of humans, gods, and beasts from classical antiquity to the present, Between Gods & Beasts: The Struggle for Humanity explores past and present narratives about human nature, potential, and creativity, and the possibilities for their corruption and cultivation.

I am also passionately involved in four creative projects at the moment: writing music and narratives for Emergence, a concept album and accompanying short story collection on the bio-mythic life; recording original music for an EP, This Time, following the 2023 release of my second studio album, Little Bird; polishing a historical novel set in fifteenth-century Italy, Imminence: Florence, 1494; and, preparing to launch a newsletter on humanistic inquiry and creative expression: Convergence.

You may read more about these and other writing projects, past and present, in the Writing section of this site, where there is a link to listen to a professionally recorded reading of the first chapter of my novel. 

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