Elizabeth received her PhD in English in 2020 from Harvard University. Her doctoral research traced the role played by sound effects in the writings of English poet and revolutionary John Milton as a way of relating his career-long preoccupation with Christian origins to early modern rationalist accounts of causation in theology, natural philosophy, and political thought. She’s presented research on figures ranging from English canon familiars like Wyatt, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Andrew Marvell to less well-known figures like Anglican theologians Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes, the anonymous author(s) of the radical “Martin Marprelate” pamphlets, activists and founding Quakers George Fox and Margaret Fell, and early American poets Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, and Phillis Wheatley. Trained as a cultural and literary historian, she is passionate (and always learning) about poetry, theater, rhetoric, aesthetics, philosophy, dialectic, and the buoyant afterlives of these ancient traditions across cultures, languages, and national borders in the twenty-first century, especially in contemporary Anglophone literature and literary criticism, developments in critical theory (including gender theory, postcolonial theory, and critical race theory), and their practical application amid the increasingly siloing engulfments of news media, public discourse, and mass entertainment. 

Elizabeth is originally from the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, CA. She received her BA in English (2010; Highest Honors) from the University of California at Berkeley. She got her start in education working as a teacher’s aide at Happy Acre Preschool and Kindergarten (owned and operated by her grandmother) in Simi Valley, CA.