Home

About me

I'm an American PhD student in the Department of Digital Humanities (formerly the Centre for Computing in the Humanities) at King's College London. I have a BA in theatre and an MFA in Shakespearean performance and staging, and consider myself a semi-professional Shakespeare geek. I'm also a former software developer, which is handy for my thesis work.

I live in south London with my wife Katrin and our three cats.

My research

My PhD research revolves around stylometric analysis of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. To make a long story short, there's a theory that Shakespeare either collaborated on the play with a contemporary of his named George Peele, or revised an earlier Peele work and left large Peele sections in place. Essentially what I'm trying to do is teach a computer to distinguish between Peele's style and Shakespeare's and then feed it bits of the play to see which parts might have been written by which playwright.

Further gory technical details are available upon request--just get in touch with me via my contact page.

My other interests

I'm an amateur actor, and I've been in some twenty-five different shows, including quite a few Shakespeare plays. My real passion, though, is Shakespearean dramaturgy--providing people the historical contexts of the plays, explaining how they fit into the rest of the canon, defining some of the more difficult words, and so on. There are parts of the plays that make much more sense if you understand (for instance) how the meaning of the word "honest" has drifted over the last four hundred years. 

If you've got a production of a Shakespeare play coming up, send me a message and I'll be glad to help you or your actors untangle some of the more obscure bits of the text. I promise not to be too pedantic.