About the Course
In this 4-week course we will read Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince (1532) and Thomas More's Utopia (1516/51). Our classes will be structured around discussion of guided reading questions, provided to you one week in advance. The classes will focus, in particular, on the following key topics:
* Civic Humanism, the Florentine Republic and the European Renaissance
* Virtú, Fortuna, and the Machiavellian Moment
* Enclosures, poverty and agrarian capitalism in early modern England
* Thomas More, Erasmus, and the Northern Renaissance
* The English Reformation
* The New World and Early Modern Skepticism
I received my doctorate in 2019 from the University of Edinburgh, where I taught several undergraduate courses, ranging from medieval and early modern literature, to Romantic, Modernist and Late-Modernist poetry and drama. My doctoral research examined the relationship between processes of state-formation in early modern England and the spectacular flourishing of religious poetry witnessed during the same period. This work has been published by leading academic journals in my field, including Modern Philology and Studies in Philology, and tries to show that religious poetry was vitally and critically responsive to broad changes in social relations and practices of rule in 17C England.
In my teaching, as in my research, I'm drawn to examining intellectual history and literary art in the context of given social and political conditions.