Bradin Cormack
Associate Professor, Department of English
Director, Nicholson Center for British Studies
Office: Walker 512
Phone: (773) 702-8910
bcormack@uchicago.edu
I specialize in sixteenth- and seventeenth- century British literature, with a focus on poetry and drama as they relate to early legal culture. My first book, A Power To Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law, 1509-1625, concerns the various ways in which imaginative literature engaged the principle of jurisdiction at a time when, at the expense of other tribunals and other laws, the central courts were consolidating the common law's institutional identity and its claims on the state and subject. A volume of essays I edited with Leonard Barkan and Sean Keilen is forthcoming as The Forms of Renaissance Thought: New Essays on Literature and Culture. At the moment I am working on two book projects: a monograph on Shakespeare and law; and a study of Shakespeare's sonnets, under the title Form Shadow Form:
Shakespeare's Sonnets and the Making of Meaning.
In addition to drama, poetry, and law, my teaching and research interests include political theory, early nationalism and imperialism, the material history of the book, and the history of disciplinarity in relation to the idea and practice of literary authorship.
Since coming to Chicago in 2000, I have taught undergraduate surveys of early modern poetry and early modern courtly literature, as well as advanced seminars on Shakespeare, Spenser, and the poetry of the 1590s. At the graduate level, I have taught seminars on the construction of literary authority in relation to classical Rome, and on early modern literature's relation to law, to British nationalism, and to the material and textual history of the learned disciplines, including law, medicine, and theology.
Courses:
Graduate: Shakespeare and the Law; Classical Authorship: Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson; Shakespeare's Sonnets; Literature, the Learned Disciplines and the Renaissance Book; Spenser and Shakespeare; The Invention of Britain in Early Modern Literature; The Matter of Law in Early Modern English Literature; Book Learning, Knowledge Forms; Marlowe and the 1590s.
Undergraduate: Shakespeare's Sonnets; Renaissance Lyric; Writing and the Early Modern Court; English Poetry from Wyatt to Milton; Place and Interpretation in Renaissance Literature; Media Aesthetics; Shakespeare: Tragedies and Romances.
Selected Publications:
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- A Power to Do Justice: Jurisidiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law, 1509–1625 (University of Chicago Press, 2008).
- The Forms of Renaissance Thought: New Essays on Literature and Culture.
Edited with Leonard Barkan and Sean Keilen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008 forthcoming).
- Book Use, Book Theory: 1500-1700. Authored with Carla Mazzio (Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago, 2005).
- “Shakespeare's Narcissus, Sonnet's Echo,” in The Forms of Renaissance Thought, ed. Barkan, Cormack, and Keilen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008 forthcoming).
- “Strange Love: Or, Holding Lands,” Law and Humanities 1.2 (2007): 31–48.
- “Tender Distance: Latinity and Desire in Shakespeare's Sonnets,” in A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. Michael Schoenfeldt (Blackwell Publishing, 2006).
- “Practicing Law and Literature in Early Modern Studies,” review article, Modern Philology 101 (2003): 79–91.
- “Pericles and the Idea of Jurisdiction,” in Literature, Mapping and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain, edited by Bernhard Klein and Andrew Gordon (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
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Education:
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Ph.D., Stanford University, 2001. Teaching at Chicago since 2000.
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Department of English
The University of Chicago
1115 East 58th Street
Chicago, IL 60637 |
© 2008 The University of Chicago
Last updated: October 2007 |