Faculty Profiles

Chris Iannini works on early American literature, with an emphasis on the history of natural history as a key intellectual obsession, scientific method, and literary practice in the Atlantic world from the early modern period through the mid nineteenth century. 

"Whether I’m teaching a literature or writing course, I structure it around problems and controversies that are rich with questions for which there are no easy answers. I want students to encounter uncertainty, to become curious, and then to let that curiosity drive their learning. Students also write a lot in my classes because writing is such a good tool for transforming curiosity and confusion into clear ideas, interpretations, and arguments. It’s tremendously gratifying to help students recognize that writing is not just for recording what they already know or reporting someone else’s ideas, but for exploring the boundaries of what they can think or say."

Professor Fulton writes about the cultural intersections of politics and religion, about problems in rhetoric and generic form, and on the history of reading and media history. His work on Erasmus, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton and other medieval and early modern writers has appeared in several journals and edited collections. His first book, Historical Milton: Manuscript, Print, and Political Culture in Revolutionary England (2010), uses the manuscript record of Milton’s thinking – mainly the reading notes in his commonplace book – to analyze Milton’s rhetorical methods and reading practices in the broader context of early modern methods of reading, note-taking, and writing. A similar set of interests motivates his second book, The Book of Books: Biblical Interpretation, Literary Culture, and the Political Imagination from Erasmus to Milton (2021), which investigates the intersections of biblical interpretation and literary production during the English Renaissance, focusing on such texts as Erasmus’s Education of a Christian Prince, Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, and Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Professor Fulton has also edited a few collections of essays, most recently The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage (2018), co-edited with Kristen Poole, which investigates the ways that Shakespeare engaged contemporary practices of biblical interpretation. In a related edited volume, The Bible and English Readers (JMEMS, 2017), a group of ten international scholars attempt to reconstruct the reading habits of both unknown and well-known biblical readers, asking what these reconstructions of readership tell us about biblical reception, English religion, national identity, and literature. With his colleague Ann Baynes Coiro he co-edited Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton (2012), which reconsiders the practice of historicism and cross-disciplinary scholarship in a series of essays from major scholars.  

Thomas Fulton is the recipient of a Folger Shakespeare Library Long-term Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, several grants from the Folger Shakespeare Library, a Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Fellowship, a Mellon Fellowship, and a Goheen Prize in Classical Studies.

Professor Fulton particularly enjoys teaching Shakespeare in performance, and leads a group of students to study with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon and at the Globe Theatre in London in the summer travel course, Shakespeare in England. He is eager to advise graduate students with a wide variety of interests.

Professor Bartels is author of Speaking of the Moor: From Alcazar to Othello (2008) and Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe (1993), which won the Roma Gill Prize for Best Work on Christopher Marlowe, 1993-94.  She is co-editor, with Emma Smith (University of Oxford), of Christopher Marlowe in Context (2013) and editor of Critical Essays on Christopher Marlowe (1997). Her most recent essays include: “Strange Bedfellows: The Ordinary Undersides of ‘A True Reportory’ and The Tempest,” “Identifying ‘the Dane’: Gender and Race in Hamlet” (2016); and “Julius Caesar: Making history” (2016).

Professor Bartels's graduate and undergraduate courses have centered on early modern literature and culture, with a focus on Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean drama. She is especially interested in questions of race, cross-cultural relations, gender, genre, and performance. 

Professor Bartels has received the Board of Trustees Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence (1993), the School of Arts and Sciences Award for Distinguished Contributors to Undergraduate Education (2008 & 1993), and the Warren I. Susman Award for Excellence in Teaching (2008) from Rutgers University. She has also been the recipient of a Solmsen Fellowship at the Institute of Research in the Humanities, at the University of Wisconsin (1995); and a Black Atlantic Project fellowship from the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. Since 2010 she has been the director, and is now dean, of the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English, a summer Master’s program designed for K-12 English and language arts teachers.