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Brent Dawson

Assistant Professor
English
Phone: 541-346-3962
Office: 473 PLC
Office Hours: Winter Term: W 12-3pm
Research Interests: Drama and Performance Studies, Renaissance/Early Modern Literary Studies

Research

Book: The Equality of Flesh: Materialism and Human Commonality in Early Modern Culture (Cornell University Press, 2024)

 

The Equality of Flesh

 

I research and teach Renaissance literature, including Spenser, Shakespeare, Cavendish, and Milton. I'm interested in theories of nature and matter, both early modern and contemporary. My first book, Equality of Flesh, looks at ideas of equality based in common matter that predate liberalism and their implications for seventeenth-century notions of race. The second project, Drift, attends to how early modern practices of meditation, particularly in the genres of poetry and essay, give an account of a mind embedded in a material world. 

 

My work has been published in ELH, New Literary HistoryRenaissance Drama, and the collection This Distracted Globe: Worldmaking in Early Modern Literature.