I was born in Vancouver and raised in Toronto, where I attended the University of Toronto Schools. I received my BA in English and Religious Studies from the University of Toronto, MPhil in Medieval English Studies from Oxford University, and PhD in English from Stanford University.
My latest book is Girl Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Bloomsbury, 2023). I am also the author of Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood (Palgrave, 2014), which was published in Palgrave’s Shakespeare Studies series, and The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2004), which won the Roland H. Bainton Prize for best book in literature from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference.
I am the editor of Performing Girls and Women, Medieval to Early Modern and Beyond (Amsterdam, 2025), which received special Open Access Publication funding from Knowledge Unlatched. I also edited a special issue of the award-winning online journal Borrowers and Lenders: the Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation (vol 9, 2014) on “Girls and Girlhood in Adaptations of Shakespeare.”
I am co-editor, with Tom Bishop, of a special issue of Shakespearean International Yearbook (vol. 20, 2023) entitled New Approaches to Pericles, Prince of Tyre. I am also co-editor, with Richard Preiss, of Childhood, Education, and the Stage in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2017); with Kaara Peterson, of The Afterlife of Ophelia (Palgrave, 2012); and, with Ananya Jahanara Kabir, of Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures (Cambridge, 2005).
I publish scholarly articles on a wide range of topics, including Anglo-French literary relations, Shakespeare adaptations, the history of feminist scholarship, medievalisms, and the reception of classical and medieval literature in the Renaissance.
In 2017, I was elected to the Royal Society of Canada, College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists, and in 2018 I was awarded a Killam Research Fellowship from the Canada Council for the Arts. In 2019 I received the President’s Research Excellence Award from York University. And in 2026 I was elected a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Over the years I have produced a number of podcasts with John Edwards of the Musicians in Ordinary featuring my work on girl performers, and collaborated with him on a series of performance-as-research projects, including a live performance of the music from Anne Boleyn’s Music Book, a radio play of John Milton’s Comus, and a full-length feature film of Elizabeth Brackley and Jane Cavendish’s The Concealed Fancies.
Other online projects include, with John Stone of the University of Barcelona, entitled Reading Shakespeare in Spain: A Catalogue of Early English Drama held in Spanish Libraries, funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant, and The GEES Project, a website devoted to Girls on Early English Stages.