Department of English

My research examines sixteenth-century writers who use risk to make sense of themselves or their present with regard to what might happen in the future and, subsequently, the development in new ways of thinking about risk’s calculability in the seventeenth-century that transformed how individuals and societies then make sense of the world. I consider how risk is used to address and generate uncertainty about a future to come in early modern contexts well before the emergence of a more formalized risk discourse.

I trace an early modern risk discourse back through the lens of European imperialism in the Americas and the Caribbean, including early modern England, Guiana, and Bermuda, although I also attend to imaginative geographies by writers for whom a new kind of global thinking propagated their varied interests and values. Overall, my dissertation project examines how writers mediate uncertainties commonly associated with the cartographic, spiritual, and environmental rhetoric of the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. I look to shipwreck narratives, island fiction, utopian and scientific writing, dramatic encounters where land meets sea, and more, to consider the rhetorical, poetic, and moral uses of uncertainty.