2021, BA English, University of Virginia
Emma Bradford is a first year PhD student specializing in early modern literature. Her research focuses on negotiations of identity in medieval and early modern drama. She is particularly interested in how non-aristocratic poets represented themselves in court masques and other occasional works written for English aristocrats.
2022, MA English, Virginia Tech
2019, BA English, Virginia Commonwealth University
Kara Rush is a first-year Ph.D. student specializing in early modern literature. In particular, Rush is interested in how early modern English authors use threatening nature and femininity to mediate anxieties concerning the preservation and contamination of English national identity. Other interests include adaptation studies and late medieval literature.
2020, MA English, Texas Christian University
2019, BA English, Texas Christian University
Andreley Bjelland is a PhD student and teaching fellow. Her research interests include crime, gender, and religion in the early modern period.
2019, MA in English, Wake Forest University
2017, BA in English, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Thomas Eric Simonson divides his time between literature of the early modern era, especially drama, and 20th century transatlantic studies and literary theory.
American Literature to 1900 to the present | British Literature from 1485 to 1660 (including Milton) | Contemporary Multiethnic American Literature | Critical Race Studies | Critical Theory and Cultural Studies | Drama | Early Modern Literature And Culture | Feminist Theory And Gender & Sexuality Studies | Poetry and Poetics | Post-Colonial Literature and Theory | Queer Theory | Transatlantic Studies
2016, BA English, Rhodes College
2019, MA English, University of Alabama
I specialize in literature, religion, and politics from 1550-1640, with expertise in lyric, dramatic, and narrative poetry from Chaucer to Milton (including Shakespeare). In addition to secondary competency in literary prose from 1500-1800, and special familiarity with the work of Laurence Sterne, I have taught courses on literature for primary and secondary schools, universities, continuing education programs, and correctional education programs.
My dissertation will evaluate the political gist of English literary depictions of Julius Caesar in the context of more radical political theory
Mellon Fellowship (2019-2024)
Ruth Rose Richardson Award (2020)
2015, M.Phil. Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Cambridge University
2014, Pedagogy, Brooklyn College (non-degree)
2013, A.B. English Literature & Theater, Brown University
Margaret Maurer’s research focuses on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and science, especially alchemy and chymistry. She explores the interaction between literature and science through manuscript and print culture, the material book, and book history.
2016, BA Liberal Arts, Sarah Lawrence College
Emma is a Comparative Literature student interested in ancient Greek philosophy. Her work explores the relationship between philosophy and poetry in Plato and Aristotle. She is also interested in language, specifically metaphor and simile.
Comparative Literature | Creative Writing | Drama | Literature and Philosophy | Philosophy Of Language | Poetry and Poetics | The English Language
2017, MA English Literature, University of Virginia
2015, BA English Literature, Bethany College
Khristian S. Smith studies late medieval and early modern literature, primarily drama placed in its religiopolitical and material contexts. Their research interests include the histories of religion and emotion, occult knowledge, and literary representations of the Devil. Their most recent publication places William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in its contemporary religious and scientific contexts by exploring the toxicological roles of night, crypts, and demons in the play. They have delivered papers on the Devil and humor in Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass, Paracelsianism in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and medieval theories of predestination in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.
Smith’s dissertation project, “Horrors of the Early Modern Imagination,” argues that the roots of current understandings of the genre and experience of horror can be traced to an early modern conception of the imagination. By engaging with the early modern imagination’s power to generate, corrupt, lie, and delude, Smith contends we can understand horror, through the imagination, as onto- epistemological: a state of being and knowing. Drawing on the growing critical work on the history of affect, this project examines historical literature and cultural artifacts to comprehend how emotions and experiences have not only evolved over time but also shaped how we think and react today.
British Literature from 1485 to 1660 (including Milton) | British Literature from its beginning to 1485 | Critical Theory and Cultural Studies | Drama | Early Modern Literature And Culture | History of the Book | Literature and History | Literature and Philosophy | Literature and Religion | Literature and Science | Literature, Medicine and Culture | Pedagogy
2018, BA English, University of Tulsa
I am a Ph.D. student studying the overlap of friendship, loyalty, and virtue in Late Medieval Romance.
British Literature from 1485 to 1660 (including Milton) | British Literature from 1660 to 1789 | British Literature from 1789 to 1900 | British Literature from its beginning to 1485 | Drama | Early Modern Literature And Culture | History of the Book | Irish Literature | Literature and History | Philosophy Of Language | Poetry and Poetics | Science Fiction | The English Language | The Novel
2017, M. A. Pennsylvania State University
I’m a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My research focuses primarily upon early modern literature and in particular, the intersections of poetics and performance, the fool figure, ballads and politics. My dissertation, “Changeling Humorists: The Speech Acts of the Early Modern English Fool,” traces the intellectual history of the fool figure through the seventeenth century. It explores how the fool democratizes an access to public voice and transfers a form of sovereignty to its audience. Currently, I am also editing Robert Armin’s Quips upon Questions for Digital Renaissance Editions.
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British Literature from 1485 to 1660 (including Milton) | Comparative Literature | Drama | Early Modern Literature And Culture | History of the Book | Irish Literature | Literature and History | Literature and Philosophy | Literature and Religion | Literature, Medicine and Culture | Pedagogy | Performance Studies | Poetry and Poetics | Transatlantic Studies | Travel Writing
