Henry S. Turner is a specialist in Renaissance literature, with a focus on theater and intellectual history, especially relations between literature and science, literature and political thought, and literature and philosophy. He is currently writing a book on ideas of experience and the "world" in Shakespeare and in American pragmatism with Jane Hwang Degenhardt (University of Massachusetts, Amherst). He edited Jonson’s Poetaster for the forthcoming Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama, ed. Jeremy Lopez. More details about past, current, and future work may be found at www.henrysturner.com.

Professor Turner is the author of three monographs on Renaissance literature and culture. The most recent, The Corporate Commonwealth: Pluralism and Political Fictions in England, 1516-1651 (University of Chicago Press, 2016), traces the history of the corporation as a political institution and political idea from Thomas More’s Utopia to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. The book shows how the corporation addressed problems of group life that formed the core of political philosophy from its inception: relations between the one and the many, the nature of sovereignty, administration and constitutions, justice as an adjudication among competing systems of value, the nature of group “personhood” and group action. The Corporate Commonwealth was awarded the 2017 Elizabeth Dietz Prize for the best book in English Renaissance Studies and Honorable Mention for the 2017 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History. Professor Turner's second monograph, Shakespeare’s Double Helix (Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2008), juxtaposes a reading of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the history of genetics and contemporary debates over genetic engineering and theories of the posthuman. His first book, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts, 1580-1630 (Oxford, 2006), places the history of theater into the rich culture of early scientific thought in England, showing how poets and playwrights borrowed some of their most important ideas about form and representation from the fields of geometry, mathematics, and cartography. In 2007, The English Renaissance Stage was awarded Honorable Mention for the best book of the year in literature and science by the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts. Professor Turner's work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, and by a Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, taken in residence at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

Professor Turner has edited a large-scale collection of essays on Early Modern Theatricality (Oxford, 2013), a collection on literature, economics, science, and urban history entitled The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England (Routledge, 2002), and a special double issue of Configurations: Journal of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts 17.1–2 (Winter 2009) on “Mathematics and the Imagination” (with Arielle Saiber). His articles, essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Annals of Science, Configurations, differences, ELH, Isis, JEMCS, Nano, postmedieval, Public Books, Renaissance Drama, Renaissance Quarterly, Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Studies, South Central Review, and The Spenser Review, as well as in a wide range of edited collections. He has served on the Editorial Board of Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance Drama, Exemplaria, and The Hare, as Book Review editor for The Upstart Crow (2005-09) and Configurations (2005-6), and on the Editorial Board of the book series “Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy” (Edinburgh University Press). In 2008, he chaired the Executive Committee for the MLA Division of Literature and Science (2004-09). With Mary Thomas Crane, he is the series co-editor for Alembics: Penn Studies in LIterature and Science (Penn Press), which publishes ground-breaking work in literature and science from the classical period to the present.  

At Rutgers, Professor Turner is the Associate Vice Chancellor for Research in the Humanities and Arts and former Director of the Center for Cultural Analysis (CCA), the leading institute for advanced interdisciplinary research in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences in SAS. He also coordinates EMRG @ RU: The Early Modern Research Group at Rutgers, an interdisciplinary research program on the period 1400-1700 that is currently sited at the CCA (formerly the Program in Early Modern Studies). In the English Department, he teaches undergraduate courses on Renaissance comedy and social life, poetry and poetics in English, French Structuralism and its legacy, and philosophies of the human. At the graduate level, he teaches seminars on early modern literature and science, on literature and political thought, on early modern theatricality, and on Ben Jonson, and he supervises graduate students in all of these areas.

Associate Vice Chancellor for Research in the Humanities and Arts, Office of Research and Innovation, Office of the Provost 

• "Introduction to Literary Study: Poetry"
• "Dekker, Middleton, Jonson, and the Drama of Everyday Life"
• "French Structuralism and its Legacy"
• "What is the Human?"

• "Ben Jonson"
• "Early Modern Theatricality"
• "The Meaning of Life: Determining the Human and Beyond"
• "Imagining Science in Early Modern England"
• "The Early Modern Political Imagination"

• Elizabeth Dietz Memorial Award for The Corporate Commonwealth for the best book in English Renaissance Studies, awarded by SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 (2017)

• Honorable Mention for The Corporate Commonwealth for the Barnard Hewitt Award, awarded by the American Society for Theatre Research for Outstanding Research in Theatre History (2017)

• Grant-in-aid, Folger Shakespeare Library, 2017-18

• ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars. 2012-13 residence at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University
  
  
• M. H. Abrams Fellowship, National Humanities Center. 2010-11
  
  
• Honorable Mention, Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize, awarded to The English Renaissance Stage, 2007
  
  
• Graduate Teaching Award, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2006
  
  
• National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship, 2004-5

• Member, Modern Language Association
• Member, Shakespeare Association of America
• Member, Renaissance Society of America
• Member, Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts

• “Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 58.2 (2018): 473-537.

• “Love Your Corporation.” Special issue of American Book Review and electronic book review on “Corporate Fictions,” ed. Jeffrey DiLeo and Joseph Tabbi. Jan-Feb. 2017: 4, 13
  
  
• “Corporate Persons, Between Law and Literature.” The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700. Ed. Lorna Hutson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 467-84.  The Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700 received the 2017 Roland H. Bainton Reference Book Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference.
  
  
• “Corporation.” Dictionary of the Possible. A special issue of Shifter Magazine, ed. Avi Alpert and Sreshta Rit Premnath. Issue 22 (2016): 47-50. 
  
  
• “The Society for the Arts of Corporation: An Invitation.” postmedieval 6.4 (2016): 485-90. Special issue on “Critical/Liberal/Arts,” ed. Allan Mitchell, Julie Orlemanski, and Myra Seaman.
  
  
• “Shakespeare, Fiction, and the Ghost of the Public University.” Shakespeare in Our Time: Essays from the SAA. Ed. Dympna Callaghan and Suzanne Gossett (London: Arden / Bloomsbury, 2016). 289-93.
  
  
• “Corporate Life in Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday.” Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater, ed. Ronda Arab, Michelle Dowd, and Adam Zucker (New York: Routledge, 2015). 182-97.

• “Generalization.” In Early Modern Theatricality, ed. Henry S. Turner. Oxford 21st Century Approaches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 1-23.

• “Corporations: Humanism and Elizabethan Political Economy.” In Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire, ed. Philip Stern and Carl Wennerlind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 153-76.
  
  
• “Book, List, Word: Forms of Translation in the Work of Richard Hakluyt.” In Formal Matters: Reading the Forms of Early Modern Texts. Ed. Allison Deutermann and András Kiséry (Manchester University Press, 2013). 202-236.
  
  
• “Francis Bacon’s Common Notion.” For “Commons and Collectivities: Renaissance Political Ecologies,” a special issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies (JEMCS), ed. Emily Shortslef and Bryan Lowrance. 13.3 (Summer 2013): 7-32.
  
  
• “Toward a New Theatricality?” In Renaissance Drama n.s. 40 (2012). 40th Anniversary Special Issue: “What is Renaissance Drama?”, ed. Jeffrey Masten and William N. West. 29-35.
  
  
• "Lessons from Literature for the Historian of Science (and Vice Versa): Reflections on 'Form'", Isis: Journal of the History of Science Society 101.3 (September, 2010): 578-89
  
  
• "Of Dramatology: Action in the Form of Tools and Machines,"Postmedieval: a journal of medieval and cultural studies 1.2 (Spring-Summer 2010): 199-207, a special issue on "When did we become post/human?," ed. Eileen A. Joy and Craig Dionne.
  
  
• "Toward an Analysis of the Corporate Ego: The Case of Richard Hakluyt." differences 20 nos. 2-3 (Summer-Fall 2009): 103-147, a special issue on "The Future of the Human," ed. Nancy Armstrong and Warren Montag.
  
  
• "Mathematics and the Imagination," a special issue of the journal Configurations 17 nos. 1-2 (Winter 2009), co-edited with Arielle Saiber (Bowdoin College)
  
  
• "Life Science: Rude Mechanicals, Human Mortals, Posthuman Shakespeare", South Central Review 26.1 & 2, Winter & Spring 2009
  
  
• "From Homo Academicus to Poeta Publicus: Celebrity and Transversal Knowledge in Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay", Co-authored with Bryan Reynolds. Writing Robert Greene: Essays on England's First Notorious Professional Writer (2008)
  
  
• "Literature and Mapping in England, 1520-1688", The History of Cartography III (2007)
  
  
• "The Problem of the More than One: Friendship, Calculation, and Political Association in The Merchant of Venice", Shakespeare Quarterly 57.4, Winter 2006
  
  
• "Performative Transversations: Collaboration Through and Beyond Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay" Co-authored with Bryan Reynolds. Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries Fugitive Explorations (2006)
  
  
• "Introduction: The Culture of Capital", The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England (2002)
  
  
• "Plotting Early Modernity", The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England (2002)
  
  
• "Nashe's Red Herring: Epistemologies of the Commodity in Lenten Stuffe (1599)", ELH: English Literary History 68.3, Winter 2001
  
  
• "Empires of Objects: Accumulation and Entropy in E. M. Forster's Howards End (1910)",Twentieth Century Literature 46, 2000
  
  
• "King Lear Without: the Heath", Renaissance Drama 28, 1997

PhD, Columbia University
MA, University of Sussex, Brighton
Diplôme Supérieur d’Etudes Françaises, Université de Bourgogne, Dijon, France
BA, Wesleyan University

• www.henrysturner.com
• www.artsofcorporation.org
• Program in Early Modern Studies
• "What Does Historicism Make Possible?: A Conference on Historicism and Its Discontents" by Henry S. Turner  (Future Traditions Magazine, Issue 2)
• "Henry S. Turner: New Faculty Profile" 
  by Emily C. Bartels (Future Traditions Magazine, Issue 2)