Scholarship/Creative Work

The Skull in the Mirror: Aesthetics in the Age of Shakespeare (under review at Oxford University Press)

Aesthetics, which has come to entail the systematic and self-conscious understanding of art as a distinctive category of human activity, is generally considered to be an invention of the eighteenth century. Earlier art, according to this narrative, remained too deeply embedded within religion and state politics for it to be capable of defining a purpose of its own. Even Renaissance humanism, often taken to be a proto-aesthetic discourse, reinforces the instrumentality of art by defending its moral and pedagogical functions. The Skull in the Mirror: Aesthetics in the Age of Shakespeare shows that lurking behind this insistence on art’s usefulness is a persistent anxiety over its uselessness. The possibility that art might, in fact, be an unjustifiable waste of time served as the basis of a version of aesthetic autonomy distinctive to the Renaissance.

“Antony and Cleopatra and the Art of Dying,” Studies in Philology 117 (2020), 488-519

“Mortal Knowledge: Akrasia in English Renaissance Tragedy,” in Politics and Aesthetics in European Baroque and Classicist Tragedy (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 221-38

“The Outmodedness of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” ELH 82 (2015), 759-87

“All’s Well That Ends,” The Cambridge Quarterly 44 (2015), 171-77

“Immortal Beloved,” The Cambridge Quarterly 42 (2013), 79-87