Early Modern Studies

The English Department at UB has a long tradition of producing innovative work in medieval and early-modern studies. We aim to train students in the historical and textual fundamentals of the period while also encouraging them to take advantage of both the interdisciplinary and cutting-edge theoretical study for which Buffalo is rightly renowned. Prominent UB faculty and students in this field have included scholars as distinguished as C. L. Barber, Robert Edwards, Leslie Fiedler, Joel Fineman, Angus Fletcher, Richard Fly, Terence Hawkes, Norman Holland, and Marc Shell. Our current faculty offers expertise in a range of areas that demonstrates our continuing commitment to original and ground-breaking work in early modernity.

The Graduate Program in English grants graduate students an unprecedented degree of freedom in their studies, students with an interest in early-modernity find themselves within an extremely open and dynamic atmosphere that is limited only by their intellectual curiosity. As a result, our program has regularly produced students with original voices and unique ways of conceptualising the field. This has been validated by our excellent record of placing early-modern graduates in tenure-track jobs – above average for the English department as a whole, and far above the national average in general. In recent years, early-modern PhD graduates have entered tenure-track jobs at American University, Boston College, Eastern Michigan, Hofstra, Miami University, SUNY Fredonia, Texas A&M, Trinity College, University of Illinois, University of Indiana, Mary Washington College, University of Montana, University of Northern Colorado, University of Oregon, UC Berkeley, Utica College, Wake Forest, and Wofford College.

Current Faculty

Barbara Bono is the author of Literary Transvaluation: From Vergilian Epic to Shakespearean Tragicomedy (1984) and a host of articles on Sidney, Spenser, and the dramatic literature of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Work-in-progress includes two book-length studies, The Gynecology of the Text: The Revisions of Sidney's "Arcadia" and some of Their Progeny, and a comparative study of the socio-symbolic conditions of production of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, c. 1580-1620.

Mili Clark is Director of Composition and Teaching Fellows at UB and regularly teaches graduate seminars on Chaucer, Milton and Romanticism.

Bob Daly is the author of God's Altar: The World and the Flesh in Puritan Poetry (1978) and specializes in Puritan literature, early American literature, and the American novel.

Susan Eilenberg is the author of Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Literary Possession, and specializes in Milton and Romanticism.

Jerold Frakes researches the literatures of several medieval traditions (Latin, German, Norse, Yiddish, English), with particular interests in the reception of ancient philosophy, issues of gender politics, and the origins and development of Eurocentric and Orientalist discourse. He has recently completed a book on sixteenth-century Christian Humanists' obsession with Jewish culture and is currently he is working on a long-term project focusing on the political construction of cultural borderlands in medieval Christian and Islamic epic. His numerous publications include The Cultural Study of Yiddish in Early Modern Europe (forthcoming), Early Yiddish Texts, 1100-1750 (ed., 2004), and Brides and Doom: Gender, Property and Power in Medieval German Women's Epic (1994).

Graham Hammill specializes in early-modern British literature, and is broadly interested in cross-disciplinary studies in critical theory and visual arts. He is the author of Sexuality and Form: Caravaggio, Marlowe, and Bacon (Chicago, 2000); and has published numerous essays in journals including English Literary History, South Atlantic Quarterly, Renaissance Drama, and Spenser Studies. He is currently finishing a book entitled Emergent Liberalism: Political Theology and the Mosaic Constitution.

James Holstun is the author of A Rational Millennium: Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-Century England and America (Oxford, 1987) and Ehud's Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (Verso, 2000), which won the 2002 Deutscher Prize. He has written essays on the Ranters, Renaissance lesbianism, the mid-Tudor crisis, and Shakespeare. Most of his future teaching and research will probably be in marxism, world literature, and American radicalism, but he will still be available for directed readings and dissertation work in early modern literature and history.

Ruth Mack's current research focuses on the relation between literary form and historical thinking in eighteenth-century Britain. She has published on Samuel Johnson (in Representations) and on Charlotte Lennox (in Novel: A Forum on Fiction).  Stanford University Press will soon publish her first book, "Literary Historicity: Literature and Historical Experience in Eighteenth-Century Britain."

Carla Mazzio specializes in late-sixteenth and seventeenth-century literature with an emphasis on drama and prose. Her areas of focus are various, but largely emphasize the history of sciences and technologies in relation to literary form, and the history of language in relation to idea formation and social agency. Broader interests include the history of the book, the history of rhetoric, the prehistory of the disciplines, and the development of quantitative thinking in social, political, and intellectual contexts. She is the editor of Shakespeare and Science (special issue of SCR, 2008); Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture (with Douglas Trevor, Routledge, 2000); and The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (with David Hillman, Routledge 1997 – winner of the English Association Beatrice White Book Prize). She is the author of The Inarticulate Renaissance (Pennsylvania, 2008), and Book Use, Book Theory: 1500-1700 (with Bradin Cormack, Chicago, 2005). She is currently working on a book entitled, “Calculating Minds: Literature and Mathematics in the Renaissance.”

Randy Schiff specializes in late-medieval literature in Middle English, with special emphases on alliterative verse and on the manuscript culture in which such texts circulated. He is currently at work on transforming his dissertation, Alliterative Revivalism: Oppositional Poetics in Late Medieval Britain, into a book that will focus on the issues of textual production in the Anglo-Scottish borderlands, and the targeted use of images of ethnic others in the North of England. His essay "Samurai on Shifting Ground: The Negotiation of the Medieval and the Modern in Seven Samurai and Yojimbo" was recently published in the anthology, Race, Class, and Gender in "Medieval" Film, edited by Lynn Ramey and Tison Pugh.

Scott Manning Stevens writes on New World contact literatures, Native American studies and seventeenth-century literature. He is the author of numerous essays, including "Sacred Heart and Secular Brain" in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, (ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, 1997), and "New World Contacts and the Trope of the 'Naked Savage'" in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, (ed. Elizabeth Harvey, 2003),  and as well as an article on William Apess and another on notions of Native Americans in early modern England. He has an essay forthcoming on the meaning of the US/Canadian border for Iroquois people.

Andrew Stott is the author of Comedy (Routledge, 2005), and the editor (with Peter Buse) of Ghosts: Psychoanalysis Deconstruction History (Macmillan, 1999), named by the Times Literary Supplement as one of its books of the year. He has written extensively on early-modern visual culture and renaissance drama, and is currently working on issues of identity and melancholy in early-modern comic theatre.

The Early-Modern Reading Group

A key aspect of UB’s early-modern studies is the Early-Modern Reading Group, an interdisciplinary research group comprised of faculty and students from the departments of English, History, Romance Languages, Comparative Literature, Classics and Art History. The EMRG is the largest interdisciplinary research group at UB, of which graduate students represent a strong and active part. The EMRG meets four times a year to share ideas and works-in-progress, and invites up to three distinguished scholars to campus a year. Recent speakers have included: Crystal Bartolovich (Syracuse), David Bell (Johns Hopkins), Heather Dubrow (UW-Madison), David Hawkes (Lehigh), Richard Kagan (Johns Hopkins), Christopher Kendrick (Loyola), Karen Kupperman (NYU), Richard Rambuss (Emory), Marcus Rediker (Pittsburgh), Barbara Stafford (Chicago), Henry Turner (UW-Madison), Valerie Traub (Michigan), and Jessica Wolfe (UNC Chapel Hill).

The Folger Consortium

Early-modern research at UB is supported by our fifteen-year membership of the Folger Consortium. The Consortium, which includes over thirty Universities, allows our graduate students and faculty to extend their knowledge and scholarly networks amid the incomparable resources of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC. With over a quarter of a million volumes of British and European literary, cultural, political, religious, and social history from the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, the Library also includes the finest collection of Shakespeareana – editions, theatrical materials, visual and musical supplements – in the world. Consortium members are eligible for Folger grants-in-aid, financial stipends that enable students to take Folger Institute seminars and research in its collections. Every year, UB students take advantage of this excellent opportunity.

Recent Graduate Course Offerings Include

  • Chaucer
  • Pre-Postcolonialism
  • Critical and Cultural Theory in Renaissance Studies
  • Spenser
  • Early Modern Women Writers
  • The Gynecology of the Text: Constructing and Deconstructing Political Power from Above and Below
    • An Eternal Blot: Early-Modern Visual Culture.
  • Commonwealth: Literature and the Mid-Tudor Crisis
  • Elizabethan-Jacobean Drama: The Illusion of Power
  • Authority, Power and Sexuality in the Principal Plays of William Shakespeare
  • Milton
  • Eighteenth-Century Histories
  • The Eighteenth-Century Novel: Theory and Practice

Recently Completed Dissertations Include

  • Maya Mathur, From Piers Plowman to Piers Pickpurse: Country-City Tensions in Early Modern Drama (2006).
  • Paul Gleed, Funeral Meats on Marriage Tables: The Festivities of Tragicomedy, (2006)
  • Ical Cetin, Tyranny in Jacobean Roman Tragedies (2005).
  • Jaesik Chung, Tears, Humor and The Critical and Clinical: Reading the baroque and sympathy in Clarissa, Tristram Shandy and Deleuze (2005).
  • Prasanta Chakravarty, "Like Parchment in the Fire:" Literature and Radicalism, 1640-1660 (2004); published as "Like Parchment in the Fire:" Literature and Radicalism in the English Civil War (Routledge, 2006).
  • Elyssa Yeuh-Ting Cheng, Voices From the Margins: Working Class Mobility in Early-Modern England (2003).
  • Charlotte Ann Pressler, Enargeia: Renaissance Rhetoric and Poetics in Petrarch, Bale, and Shakespeare (2002).
  • Evan Gottlieb, Feeling British: Sympathy and the Literary Construction of National Identity, 1707-1832 (2002).
  • Abigail Coykendall, Conjuring Inherited Empire: Gothic Real Estate and the Eighteenth Century British Novel (2002).
  • Catharine Gray: Forward Writers/Critical Readers: Women and Counterpublic Spheres in Seventeenth-Century England (2001); forthcoming from Palgrave.
  • Bradley Greenberg, Structuring Tragedy (2001).
  • Marsha Ginsberg, Reconceiving Melancholy: Gynecological Modes of Difference in Shakespeare's Hamlet and Richard II (1999).
  • Geoffrey Wilson, Renaissance Machiavellism and the Subject of Psychoanalysis (1997).
  • Lewis Daly, "Saith the spirit, to this shattered earth": Mid-seventeenth-century Puritan Radicalism and the History of Religious Forms of Class Struggle (1996).
  • Katharine Gillespie: Table Talk: Seventeenth-Century English and American Women Writers and the Rhetoric of Radical Domesticity (1996); published as Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth-Century (Cambridge, 2004).