Associate Professor of English
Director, Center for Early Modern Studies
6133 Helen C. White Hall
608-263-2832
hsturner@wisc.edu
www.wisc.edu/english/hturner
MA (1995), MPhil, (1997), PhD (2000), Columbia
University
MA, University of Sussex, 1994
BA, Wesleyan University, 1991
Renaissance Drama, esp. comedy; theater and print culture; early modern intellectual history, esp. literary theory and early scientific thought; history of sexuality and the family; medieval literary, social, and intellectual history; contemporary critical theory, esp. Marxism, Foucault, and Derrida.
I have recently completed a book on Renaissance drama, practical knowledge, and the history of scientific thought entitled The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics and the Practical Spatial Arts (Oxford: OUP, February 2006). I am also the editor of The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2002), and my articles have appeared or are forthcoming in ELH, Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance Drama, Twentieth Century Literature, and The History of Cartography (University of Chicago Press). I am a contributor to The Norton Anthology of Drama (forthcoming 2007) and am co-editor of the book series Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity (Ashgate Press).
I am currently at work on several projects: Shakespeare's Double Helix, a short book on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the relationship between poetic and scientific discourses in early modern England, and how the play sheds light on 21st century biotechnology and the problem of the posthuman ("Shakespeare Now!" series, ed. Ewan Fernie and Simon Palfrey; Continuum Press, 2007); The Corporate Commonwealth, a book-length study of the concept of the "corporation," including early modern philosophies of industry, technology, and economy and their relationship to notions of political community and political subjectivity; and a special issue of Configurations: Journal of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts devoted to "Mathematics and the Imagination" that I am guest-editing with Arielle Saiber (Italian, Bowdoin College).
I have taught undergraduate courses on English literature from Chaucer to Aphra Behn, on Dekker, Middleton, Jonson; on theories of space and representations of early modern London; on Shakespeare; and on French linguistic structuralism and its legacy. I have taught graduate seminars on topographesis in early modern literature from More to Shirley; on philosophies of "life"; and on imagining "science" in early modern England. In 2006 I received the English Department's Graduate Teaching Award.