This paper coins and explores the concept of flashlights, focusing mainly on Donne's secular and devotional poetry and on other early modern writers. Flashlights, it maintains are pleas/ orders/ invitations using a direct allusion to a bodily sense (e.g., "See," "Listen"). That allusion is often linked to a cognitive process. In…

Amateur bibliographers who espoused the Baconian theory of Shakespearean authorship in the later 19th and early 20th century — people like Orville Owen, Ignatius Donnelly, and Elizabeth Wells Gallup — have been dismissed as quacks. And they are. But, as I hope to show, their methods were also born out of a rapidly transforming media…

Nicolas Boileau is often credited with reintroducing the category of the sublime in 1674, but in fact he writes after nearly 300 years of explicit thought about the sublime in the tradition of Longinus, and still more of its inarticulated practices in performances. Yet despite this long tradition, modern readers of early modern…

This talk will explore two distinctive ways in which lyric poetry can be said to think. First, I will argue that poems think by phenomenalizing concepts, by using mimetic representation to transform abstractions into particulars that appear and, at the same time, reveal how appearance itself is structured. Second, I will argue that poems…

Among his poetic contemporaries, George Herbert stands out as a virtuoso of containers and containment: The Temple’s strong architectural conceit implies a delimited physical structure, within which lyric poems — often featuring boxes, cases, bags, and other vessels — call attention to their own formal limits of line and…

As mainstream theater slowly adopts more transgender-informed casting practices, plays like The Roaring Girl, Middleton and Dekker’s city comedy featuring the notorious and historical Moll Frith, become attractive vessels for nonbinary and genderqueer character readings and staging. While infusions of contemporary stakes…

Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at Yale University and Author of Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance (Penn Press, 2014).

Assistant Professor of English at Clark University. He specializes in the literature of the 16th and 17th Centuries. He teaches courses on race, disability, and emotions in early modern British literature.

Associate Professor of English at John Hopkins University, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and Author of The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance…

The Stain of Slavery in Early Modern England

Shakespeare in the Trans Archive

On Protean Acting in Shakespeare:  Race & Virtuosity

Inglorious, Unemployed: Trans/Crip Conjunctions and the Law of Maims in Samson Agonistes

This event has been canceled.

Milton, Newton, and the Making of a Modern World

Reception in the Thorp Library to follow talk.

Co-sponsored with the 18th C./Romantic Studies Colloquium.

"Adventures in the Skin Trade: Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko and the Marks of Religion" 

Co-sponsored with the University Center for Human Values.

Publishing Workshop with Dr. Jessica Wolfe, Articles Editor for Renaissance Quarterly

" 'Men are lived over again': the Transmigrations of Sir Thomas Browne"

Montaigne the Barbarian

"Failures of Selfhood: Augustine, Hamlet, and the Rise of the Aesthetic"

Reception in the Thorp Library to follow talk.