I teach courses in Shakespeare, the English Renaissance, and the medieval period—often with focus on how texts are understood to resist or contribute to “modern” conceptions of selfhood, desire, political community, and so on. I also like to look into how these texts are made contemporary in filmic adaptations, whether this means figuring out what Sean Connery has in common with The Green Knight or what, if anything, Mel Gibson’s way of being in the world has to do with Hamlet’s. As a scholar, I also have interests in queer theory, friendship, geography, theories of space, and public sphere theory—and in how all relate to the history of vulnerability.
It is that history to which I turn in my book project, "Open Subjects: Renaissance Republicans and the Forms of Modern Selfhood." Specifically I look at portrayals of the self and of the experience of vulnerability in literary texts of the English republican tradition, with an eye to how that tradition does and can help shape how we theorize selfhood today. Analyzing works by Spenser, Shakespeare, Marvell, and Milton, I emphasize how they conceive of the self's boundaries as linguistically and corporeally "open"-as susceptible to their surroundings, and especially to other selves. While the republican quality of Renaissance texts is often located in their gestures toward models of modern selfhood founded on individuated, rights-bearing existence, I argue that the republicanism of these texts also consists in how they elaborate forms of selfhood founded on openness and exposure. I underscore how early modern sociality often unsettles stable, discrete, delineated subjectivity, and demonstrate how social relations compromise bodily integrity and personal identity alike; in republican thought reaching back to the classical period and continuing through the seventeenth century, being an ideal friend, citizen, or participant in the public sphere often means abandoning autonomy in favor of radically unstable, transformative activity. Reflecting on the imperfect thresholds which separate selves, my texts of focus speak to parallel reflections today-for example, those on how to put the vulnerability exploited by hate speech to salutary use, those that find value in the capacity of public interaction to dissolve personal boundaries, and those that question whether such boundaries should always only serve protective purposes.
B.A., University of Maryland, College Park
MA, PhD, The Johns Hopkins University
Current Work (forthcoming or in print):
"Habermas Goes to Hell: Pleasure, Public Reason, and the Republicanism of Paradise Lost," Criticism 51.1 (2009);
"Unbuilding the City: Coriolanus and the Birth of Republican Rome" (Shakespeare Quarterly 58:2 (2007);
"Timon of Athens: Scepticism, Sovereignty, Sodomy" (in ShakesQueer (Duke UP, 2009);
"'And here's thy hand': Titus in a Time of Terror" (Shakespeare Yearbook, 2009);
reviews in SQ, Modern Language Quarterly, and Criticism.
|
|
