I am currently working on two projects: an ongoing study of caucusing in the classroom and a monograph on soldiers and martyrs in Shakespeare’s plays. 

Students’ self-defined identities – around race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexuality, religion, disability, not to mention family and community obligations – are not always visible or definitive in ways that we might expect. How do we meet students where they are, while designing learning environments that help them support each other’s development? By way of partially answering this question, Marissa Greenberg and I propose a social justice pedagogy that we call alliance-based caucusing. Alliance-based caucusing does not make pedagogy personal, but it acknowledges the plurality of our students’ experiences as they intersect with our own.

“Shakespeare and the Politics of Martyrdom” uses Foucault’s work on biopower to draw out surprising connections between the soldier and the martyr in early modern English drama. By staging moments in which soldiers die extraordinarily brutal deaths off the battlefield rather than on it, Shakespeare’s plays use the imagery of Christian martyrdom to highlight the otherwise anonymous sacrifices made by English infantrymen. “Sometimes,” Foucault observes, “what [the individual] has to do for the state is to live, to work, to produce, to consume, and sometimes what he has to do is to die.” The plays examined in this study dramatize the thin line between these two forms of political utility.