Ongoing and Upcoming

With Jane Hwang Degenhardt (English, University of Massachusetts, Amherst), I recently co-led two seminars at the Shakespeare Association of America on “Shakespearean Cosmologies,” inviting papers to look past the early modern as the origin point for globalization or a source for humanist worldviews and instead exploring the more radical cosmologies of the 16^th and 17^th centuries to twist the epistemological and ontological settlements of modernity and seed ideas for our own speculative world-making. Talks on “Shakespeare’s Dark Cosmologies” are forthcoming at the University of Oxford and the University of Cork in Fall 2025.

I recently spoke on “Literature and Science: New Horizons for Scholarship in Renaissance Studies, and Today” to the Department of English and the Brain Korea Project at Ewha Womans University and to the English Department at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, South Korea. Dr. Degenhardt and I led a workshop on “Understanding the World Through Literature and Science: Toward a Cosmological Aesthetics” at Seoul National University, and I was honored to deliver a Special Guest Lecture on “Questions Concerning Cosmology” to the Institute for British and American Studies at Korea University. Thanks to all of the wonderful colleagues who welcomed Jane and me to Seoul, but especially to Dr. Jayun Choi (English, Korea University—and Rutgers English PhD 2014!), Dr. Hikyoung Lee (English, Korea University), and Dr. Youngjin Chung (English, Ewha Womans University).

I gave a paper on “The Art of Terror in Jonson’s Sejanus” in the seminar on “Early Modern Horror” at the 2024 annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America in Portland, OR. The paper approaches Jonson’s great tragedy of Tiberian Rome as a study in horror as a public affect: the gratification of any individual will has become a form of freedom, and this freedom is experienced as a collective act. Sejanus has much to teach us, for it shows that horror is not a perversion of democracy but rather an expression of its essence. If democracy describes a world in which the law has been structured to maximize freedom and pleasure for all, horror describes a political world in which terror might issue from each and every person, a paranoid state in which every individual pleasure has become absolute and a law unto itself and imposed on others: the world not only of tyranny but of fascism, hate crimes, public shootings, immigration raids, and incidental, intentional violence.

With Dr. Degenhardt, I am currently co-writing a book on the concept of the “world” in Shakespeare’s theater, tentatively entitled Shakespearean Cosmologies: Aesthetics, Ethics, Experience. The book examines cosmological thinking in Shakespeare’s plays as a source for pluralistic models of worlds and for speculative world-making, both in the early modern period and in our own time. The book explores alternative models to globalization and anthropocentrism by excavating worldly, planetary, and cosmological configurations that root back to ancient traditions and become reanimated in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in a period of colonial expansion and radical innovation in the systems of meaning and value that structured early modern experience. The book’s  methodological framework is informed by postcolonial environmental criticism, critical race studies, American pragmatism, and 20^thand 21^st-century fiction. By introducing cosmological thinking as a pluralistic, dynamic, and multi-scaled approach to what worlds are, where they come from, and what they might yet become, we aim to advance an account of world-making that is at once aesthetic and ethical in its orientation; Shakespeare’s plays, we argue, uniquely capture the complexity, difficulty, and radical power of worlding—and violent un-worlding—at the turn of the 17^thcentury. Working across several plays, each chapter takes up key concepts that function as new cosmological constants for modernity: the spatio-temporal concept of the horizon, the condition of betweenness, the ontological significance of kind and associated notions of race and the human, cosmological ideas of harmony, form, and hyper-relationality, and the speculative capacities of fiction. By addressing how Shakespeare’s plays invoke multiple worlds simultaneously—the worlds of the human and the inhuman; the natural, supernatural, and artificial; the sacred and the secular; the past and the present; the physical and the metaphysical—the book aims to provide an alternative to accounts of the singularity and knowability of the world usually associated with Renaissance humanism, with the Cartesian cogito, or with the scientific revolution.

Two essays from the book have recently appeared: Henry S. Turner, “Worlds of Experience: Fiction in Sidney and Shakespeare,” in a special issue of SEL: Studies in English Literature on “World, Globe, Planet,” 62.1 (Winter 2022), examines how Sidney and Shakespeare understood the ontology of fictional world-making, the nature of images, the relationship of art to experience, and the capacity of fiction to estrange us from the world so that we can imagine new ecological and political dispositions for it. Jane Hwang Degenhardt and Henry S. Turner, “Between Worlds in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors,” Exemplaria 33.2 (2021): 158-83 discusses how conceptions of experience, enworlding, and the Mediterranean region inform Shakespeare’s response to early modern globalization and its racializing tendencies.

Thinking about applying to graduate school in English Literature? You really need to look at Rutgers. At a moment when many programs are scaling back funding and pushing five year degrees, Rutgers guarantees six full years of funding for all our admitted students, a package that includes three full years of fellowship (in the first, fifth, and sixth years, with opportunities for more). Plus mentored teaching, superb faculty across all historical periods, fantastic, happy graduate students, and distinguished alumni. The result? One of the best PhD placement records in the country.

Thinking about applying to graduate school in Renaissance / Early Modern? You really need to look at Rutgers! It’s one of the strongest areas of a strong department, with full-time tenured faculty covering  the entire period, from the late 15th century to the Restoration: 16th and 17th century lyric, literature and the English Revolution, humanism, the Bible and the Reformation, book history and the history of reading, race, Islam and postcolonial theory, feminism, theater and performance, literature and science, theories of fiction and poetics, law and literature, intellectual history, theory and philosophy, and political thought. Browse the faculty pages to get a sense of our current work.

Congratulations to Emily Coyle (English Department, Rutgers Newark), whose 2024 PhD from Rutgers English was a finalist for the 2025 J. Leeds Barroll Dissertation Prize from the Shakespeare Association of America, selected from among all annual dissertations in a blind competition juried by the field’s most distinguished scholars. Emily joins Nicole Sheriko (English Department, Yale University; 2022 J. Leeds Barroll Prize winner), Debapriya Sarkar (English Department, University of Connecticut, Avery Point; 2015 J. Leeds Barroll Prize winner), Chris Crosbie (NC State; Rutgers 2008; 2009 J. Leeds Barroll Prize Winner) and Scott Trudell (Univ. of Maryland; Rutgers 2012; 2012 J. Leeds Barroll Prize Honorable Mention) as the fifth student from Rutgers English to be recognized by the SAA’s top Dissertation Prize—a testimony to the rigor, creativity, and enduring impact of the graduate program in Early Modern English Literature at Rutgers, New Brunswick.