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Joshua Scodel

Joshua Scodel

Helen A. Regenstein Professor
Department of English
Department of Comparative Literature
Committee on Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities

Office: Classics 402
Phone: (773) 702-8501
jscodel@uchicago.edu

My major field of research is sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literary history in relation to intellectual, cultural, and political history. Special interests include early modern English literature's engagements with classical and Renaissance continental literature and philosophy; Renaissance genre theory and practice; and literary criticism's relation to literary practice, ancient to early modern.

I have published two books as well as articles on Donne, Jonson, Cavalier love poetry, Interregnum retirement literature, the Restoration Pindaric ode, the English lyric 1650-1740, seventeenth-century English literary criticism, and Dryden's critical principles.  I am currently completing with Janel Mueller an edition of Queen Elizabeth I’s translations and writing a book on the paradoxes of early modern English representations of liberty.  I formerly edited the journal of literary history, Modern Philology. I regularly teach courses on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English lyric, Milton, and the history of literary criticism (classical to late eighteenth century).

Courses:

Graduate: Sixteenth-Century Prose and Poetry; Seventeenth-Century Secular Poetry; History of Criticism: Classical to the Eighteenth Century; Milton and Early Modern Liberty; Seventeenth-Century Neoclassicism; Pastoral and Georgic Poetry: Genre and Ideology; Renaissance Love Poetry.

Undergraduate: Greek Thought and Literature; Milton; Literary Criticism from Aristotle to Eliot; Renaissance Literary Imagination.

Selected Publications:
  • Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature, Literature in History Series (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
  • The English Poetic Epitaph: Commemoration and Conflict from Jonson to Wordsworth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
  • “Lyric and Private Kinds,” in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 2, 1500-1660, ed. Gordon Braden, Robert Cummings, and Theo Hermans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
  • “ ‘None’s Slave’: Some Versions of Liberty in Donne’s Satires 1 and 4,” ELH 72 (2005): 363-85.
  • (ed. with Elissa Weever) Una selva filologica: Essays in Honor of Paolo Cherchi, a special issue of Modern Philology 101 (2003).
  • (ed. with Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener) Toward World Literature, a special centennial issue of Modern Philology 100:4 (2003).
  • “Alternative Sites for Literature:  Rural, Convivial, and Intellectual Domains, 1642-1659,” chapter 24 of The New Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. 2:  Writing in Early Modern Britain from the Reformation to the Restoration, ed. Janel Mueller and David Loewenstein (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 763-789.
  • “Dryden the Critic’s Historicist and Cosmopolitan Mean,” Au delà de la Poétique: Aristote et la littérature de la Renaissance / Beyond the Poetics;  Aristotle and Early Modern Literature, ed. Ullrich Langer (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2002), pp. 79-90.
  • “The Cowleyan Pindaric Ode and Sublime Diversions,” in A Nation Transformed:  England after the Restoration, ed. Alan Houston and Steven Pincus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 180-210.
  • (ed. with Katie Trumpener) Religion, Gender, and the Writing of Women:  Historicist Essays in Honor of Janel Mueller, a special issue of Modern Philology (2000).
  • “Seventeenth-Century English Literary Criticism:  Classical Values, English Texts and Contexts,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 3: The Renaissance c. 1500-1700, ed. Glyn P. Norton (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 543-554.

Education:

Ph.D., Yale University, 1985.  Teaching at Chicago since 1985.

Department of English
The University of Chicago
1115 East 58th Street
Chicago, IL 60637

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Last updated: August 2007

 

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