My primary academic research and teaching areas are in Renaissance Drama, especially William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, in critical theory and philosophy, and in early modern intellectual history, especially literary theory and early scientific thought, the history of political economy, law, colonization, and the State, cartography, and theories of space in early modern mathematics, poetry, and theater.

I am currently writing a book with Jane Hwang Degenhardt (U-Mass, Amherst) on early modern notions of cosmology and worlds, especially as viewed through Shakespeare's plays, tentatively entitled Shakespearean Cosmologies: Aesthetics, Ethics, Experience. I recently edited Ben Jonson's Poetaster for the Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama, ed. Jeremy Lopez.

Along with Mary Thomas Crane, I edit a book series entitled Penn Studies in Literature and Science (Penn Press). The series publishes books on all aspects of literature and science from the medieval to the 19th century. Visit the link to find out more about the series or about how to submit a proposal.

At Rutgers I am Henry Rutgers Professor of English and Vice President for Academic Initiatives for the university. I have served Rutgers as the Interim Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Chief Academic Officer, as the inaugural Associate Vice Chancellor for Research in the Humanities and Arts, and as a former Director of the Center for Cultural Analysis. At the CCA I coordinate EMRG @ RU: The Early Modern Research Group at Rutgers, which sponsors talks, colloquia, and other forms of intellectual exchange on all aspects of the period 1500-1700. I am also a member of the Race and the PreModern World Working Group at the CCA and of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Colloquium, an English Department faculty-graduate student research group.