B.A., Occidental College, 2017
Promise joined the Department of English in 2018. His work lies broadly in the field of early modern British literature, with a focus on poetry and Reformation writing. His research takes sixteen and seventeenth-century English poems as sites of political thinking. His dissertation project explores how early modern poets domesticated apocalyptic paradigms, by working through the conceptual problem of poetic endings, in order to creatively legitimize the stabilization of the existing socio-political order in a period of strife. Understanding how poetic resources helped give shape to this ‘conservative’ political impulse allows us to rethink the social use and historicity of poetry and its formal dimensions, along with the dominant historiography around apocalyptic discourse in relationship to political life in Reformation England.
He also worked as an assistant project manager for the Princeton Prosody Archive and served as the Inclusive Pedagogy Initiative graduate fellow for the International Spenser Society.