I am currently working on two different projects. One I imagine as a relatively short book, a spin-off from my engagement with literary scholars, What's in a name: How historians know Shakespeare was Shakespeare, to be published in 2026 by the University of Manchester Press. I have long been intrigued by the Shakespeare authorship controversy; while a wide range of people espouse alternative candidates for the author of the plays, no historian of Early Modern Britain doubts Shakespeare’s authorship. My book aims to explain this divergence by focusing first on how historians make judgements about evidence, and then what we know about early modern society to make William Shakespeare of Stratford a plausible author for the plays.

The second and more substantial project is a study of patriarchy as a social formation in early modern England. In Gender, Culture and Politics I argued that the ways in which unruly women and failed patriarchs were shamed and disciplined was part of the process of maintaining patriarchal equilibrium, but it became clear to me that historians have not adequately analyzed patriarchy as a social formation.  In a recent essay in Gender and History, I have provided a first take on this issue by reframing some of what I did in Gender, Culture and Politics, arguing that the contradictions of patriarchy are critical to the process by which patriarchy both changes and survives.  This is a kaleidoscopic project that revisits and reinterprets issues I have explored throughout my career, while engaging new sources and new questions. 

My current interest is in tracing the lives of enslaved children who were painted with elite women during the Restoration.  Finding out about the lives of children pictured on canvas is a challenge, but it reminds us of the real lives of children in the period.  

Finally, I serve as co-editor (with Professor Paul Monod at Middlebury College) of volume III (1500-1750) of the New Cambridge History of Britain, which we expect to be published in 2027.