People
- Aidan Selmer
- Doctoral Candidate
- Selmer_CV_9.24.docx
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - Primary Areas of Specialization: Early Modern Drama and Poetry, Music, Voice and Sound Studies, Reformation History
- Field of Interest: Drama & Performance Studies, Early Modern, Poetry & Poetics, Sound Studies
- About:
My dissertation, Mysterious Harmonies: Robert Johnson, Musical Collaboration, and Shakespeare’s Last Plays, considers the formal influence exerted by composers and musicians upon early English drama. Facing competition from the Jacobean masque, and having leased the musically-famed Blackfriars Playhouse in 1608, the King’s Men radically increased the musical elements within their plays. In spite of this development, critics have overlooked the role that composers have had in the production of Shakespeare’s plays, reading their contributions to theatre music as negligible when compared with company clowns and players. As my project shows, however, the royal lutenist and composer Robert Johnson actively helped the King’s Men develop what I am calling a dramaturgy of “mysterious harmony” in Shakespeare’s last plays--from Pericles (1607/09) to Henry VIII (1613). Within this theatrical mode, music reveals what is not known, influences minds, repairs broken relationships, and compensates for failures in language.
My project is supported by a University and Louis Bevier Completion Fellowship, and an article derived from it, titled "'All Sorts, All Sects, Associate Me Thither': Robert Johnson and the Music of Henry VIII," is under review with the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. I have also written on the Reformation's influence on poetic style, and my essay, "'Through a Glass, Darkly': Paradise Lost and Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians," has been published in Milton Studies.
- Undergraduate Courses Taught:
English 320: Hearing Voices in Shakespeare
English 317: Major Renaissance Writers
English 201: Principles of Literary Study
Writing 101: Expository Writing
English 315: Shakespeare: the Later Plays (guest lecturer)
- Awards:
University and Louis Bevier Completion Fellowship
Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis Fellowship
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada--Doctoral Fellowship
Folger Dissertation Seminar Participant
Bridget Gellert Lyons Prize--for paper entitled, "'Through a Glass, Darkly': Paradise Lost and Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians."
Catherine Musello Cantelupo Prize--for paper entitled, "The Body Politics of Kneeling in Titus Andronicus and the Book of Common Prayer"
- Membership Affiliations:
Renaissance Society of America
Shakespeare Association of America
Sixteenth-Century Society
- Education: B.A. Summa Cum Laude, College of William & Mary M.A. University of Toronto
- Sylvester Cruz
- Graduate Student
- At Rutgers Since: 2018
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - Primary Areas of Specialization: Drama of the English Renaissance (from Antiquity to the First Civil War) | Intellectual History, esp. the history of Renaissance Humanism and historical affect theory | History of Reading, esp. Protestant Biblical commentary and allegoresis
- Field of Interest: Early Modern, Medieval, Pedagogy, Poetry & Poetics, Seventeenth Century, Theory
- About:
Sylvester Cruz is a doctoral student in the English department at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. He is a third culture adult, having been raised as a dual citizen of both the United States and the Republic of South Africa, and earned his undergraduate degree from the University of California at Santa Cruz. His primary research interests are the drama, literature, and poetry of the Early Modern period, as well as the history of ethics, interpretation, and the emotions. He is especially interested in how biblical hermeneutics shaped the intersection of allegorical literature and early modern affect theory, as well as how the tradition of Roman Stoicism informed humanist literary and philosophical texts.
- Education: B.A., General Literature, University of California - Santa Cruz
- Noelle Darling
- Graduate Student
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - Field of Interest: Postcolonial
- Diana Molina
- Graduate Student
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
- Bria Paige
- Graduate Student
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - Field of Interest: African-American & Diaspora, Gender & Sexuality
- Education:
B.A. in English, Spelman College