Scales of Nature is a monograph in progress and emerges for a couple decades of my own fascination with bees. It looks at one chapter in a millennia-spanning fascination with apis mellifera. While my materials begin with early modern England—and an extraordinary book of beekeeping books—interest in apis mellifera spanned Europe and was foundational in early America. I consider how early modern human-insect relations fundamentally reshaped understandings of measure and comparison. While the honeybee has often been read as either a static, literary symbol or a creature of agriculture (but not culture), this project argues that early modernity functioned as a vital laboratory for shifting ideas of scale at a time when the study of insects required not just an understanding of the culture in agriculture (and vice versa) but a political entomology. I not only consider scale but I am aiming to recover an earlier and more corporeal sense of scale, one rooted in magnitude, metabolism, energy, and numerousness (or populousness) rather than the coordinates literary studies tends to borrow from geography (time, speed, and distance). By bridging environmental humanities, literary and cultural studies, and the history of science, I hope to trace how sometimes-dizzying shifts of scale from the microscopic gaze to gardens to the sprawling networks of early colonialism forced a radical rethinking of the boundaries between the miniature insect body and global political systems.

While Scales of Nature is in progress and represents a new departure, some earlier publications have helped set the tone and agenda for the project—even those I wrote before I knew this would be a book:

• "Scale"

  In Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance: Vol. 2: Concepts, edited by Joseph Campana and Keith Botelho, 29–48. College Station, PA: Penn State University Press, 2023.

• "Bee" (with Keith Botelho)

  In Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance: Vol. 1: Insects, edited by Joseph Campana and Keith Botelho, 111–125. College Station, PA: Penn State University Press, 2023.

• "Spatial and Scalar Multitudes: Thinking with World, Globe, and Planet" (with Ayesha Ramachandran)

  SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 62, no. 1 (Winter 2022): 3–18.

• "Herd, Swarm, Flock: Animal Populations in Early Modern England"

  In The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Animals, edited by Holly Dugan and Karen Raber, 116–125. Routledge, 2020.

• "The Bee and the Sovereign (II): Segments, Swarms, and the Shakespearean Multitude"

  In The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies, Vol. II, edited by Bryan Reynolds, Paul Cefalu, and Gary Kuchar, 59–80. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

• "The Bee and the Sovereign? Political Entomology and the Problem of Scale"

  Shakespeare Studies 41 (2013): 94–113.