Henry S. Turner
Assistant Professor, Department of English

BA, Wesleyan University, 1991
MA, University of Sussex, 1994
MA (1995), MPhil, (1997), PhD (2000), Columbia University

Office Telephone: 263-2832
hsturner@facstaff.wisc.edu

My primary research and teaching area is in Renaissance Drama, primarily comedy, and in 20th century critical theory, esp. Marxism, Foucault, Derrida, and psychoanalysis. I also do research and teach in the areas of theater history and print culture; in early modern intellectual history, esp. literary theory and early scientific thought; in the history of sexuality and the family; and in related areas of medieval literary, social, and intellectual history.

My current research examines English Renaissance drama as an example of what historians of science have termed "practical knowledge," a hybrid mode of understanding based partly on the proto-empirical methods of artisanal workshops and building sites and partly on humanist habits of reasoning derived from the fields of classical ethics, rhetoric, and poetics. I suggest that the history of the "literary" field during the early modern period may not be accurately understood without reference to the way contemporary proto-scientific fields were developing at the same time and to the analysis of knowledge-formation, in both its intellectual and social dimensions, that has been undertaken by historians of science such as A. C. Crombie, Paolo Rossi, Antonio Perez-Ramos, Hélène Vérin, and Pamela Long.

An omnibus statement of my current project's primary arguments and evidence can be found in my article entitled "Plotting Early Modernity," in a collection of essays I have recently edited entitled The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2002). "King Lear Without: The Heath," Renaissance Drama, n.s. 28 (1997): 161-193 deals with problems of spatial representation in dramatic form, both on stage and in print. "Nashe's Red Herring: Epistemologies of the Commodity in Lenten Stuffe (1599)" ELH 68 (2001): 529-561 undertakes an intellectual history of the commodity form from Aristotle to Nashe to Marx and examines different competing early modern modes of understanding material objects. "'Empires of Objects': Accumulation and Entropy in E.M. Forster's Howards End (1910)" Twentieth Century Literature 46 (2000): 328-345 pursues similar questions in the context of literary modernism, examining Forster's various formal techniques for representing capital accumulation as a total process, as well as their ideological implications. An article forthcoming in the History of Cartography Vol III: The Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2005) on "Maps and Literature in England" traces the literary use of maps and the map-image during the period and proposes several avenues for future research into the relationship between cartographic and literary representation. I am currently a co-editor, with Mary Thomas Crane, of the series Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity (Ashgate Press), devoted to ground-breaking work on the relationship between literary and scientific discourse during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; forthcoming books in the series include a study of Bruno's "geometrical rhetoric" and a collection of essays on literary and medical discourse.

At Madison, I have taught undergraduate and graduate courses on Dekker, Middleton, Jonson and critical concepts of everyday life, on "imaginary topographies" in early modern literature from More to Shirley, on Shakespeare, and on English literature from Chaucer to Aphra Behn.