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Miriam Jacobson

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Associate Professor
Education:

Ph.D, English Literature, The University of Pennsylvania, 2005.

AB, English Literature and Renaissance Studies, Brown University, 1998.

Research Interests:

Professor Jacobson specializes in early modern British literature and poetry.  Her research interests include Anglo-Ottoman trade, the role of antiquity, and the history of material texts and language.  Jacobson is the author of Barbarous Antiquity: Reorienting the Past in the Poetry of Early Modern England, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). The book argues that England's early mercantile trade with the Ottoman Empire changed the way poets wrote and thought about Greek and Roman antiquity in the late sixteenth century. Her second book project, Renaissance Undead: Reanimating the Past in Early Modern England explores the concept of "Renaissance" from a uniquely early modern perspective, arguing that the rebirth of the past is figured in the animation and resurrection of dead bodies in poetry, prose, images, and drama. Jacobson's essays and articles have appeared in Shakespeare Survey, Studies in Philology, Literature Compass, and several edited collections. She reviews essays for the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies and for Early Modern Studies. Jacobson is editor, with colleagues Sujata Iyengar and Christy Desmet, of the Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation (2019), and of Organic Supplements: Bodies, Things and the Natural World 1580-1790, with Julie Park (University of Virginia Press, 2020). She is also editing Shakespeare's narrative poems for the Internet Shakespeare Editions.

Grants:

Jacobson has held a postdoctoral fellowship at McGill University and two short-term research fellowships plus an NEH seminar grant at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Her research has been supported at UGA by the Sarah H. Moss Fellowship, the Provost's Summer Research Grant, and the English Department Travel grant. She received UGA's Willson Center Fellowship for 2014-2015 to continue her research for Renaissance Undead. She was a recipient of UGA and Notre Dame's Berlin Fellowship for summer 2020. For the academic year 2021-2022, Jacobson was a core research fellow on the collaborative research project "Sensing the Truth: Changing Conceptions of the Perceptual in Early Modern and Enlightenment Europe" at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Selected Publications:

 

New Essays

"The Poetics of Antiquarian Accumulation in "A Lover's Complaint", Shakespeare Survey Summer 2024: forthcoming

"Mummy in the Early Modern English Imagination," The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World (London: Routledge, forthcoming)

"Death Queers Time in the Poetry of John Donne," in Lauren Shoet and Christine Varnado, eds., Queering Death in Early Modern England (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming)

Books

Miriam Jacobson, Barbarous Antiquity: Re-orienting the Past in the Poetry of Early Modern England (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014)

Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar, Miriam Jacobson, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation (Routledge: 2019)

Miriam Jacobson and Julie Park, eds., Organic Supplements: Bodies and Things of the Natural World, 1580-1790 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020) 

Book cover, Barbarous Antiquity        Book cover, Routledge Handbook       Book cover, Organic Supplements

 

Of note:

Since 2012 Jacobson has co-organized the Willson Center sponsored Symposium on the Book, an ongoing semiannual one-day symposium on material and immaterial textuality held at the Special Collections Libraries Building in the spring and fall.

Jacobson's undergraduate and graduate courses explore everything from Renaissance Drama and Poetry to global trade, travel, racial and religious difference, temporality and antiquity, and the materials of writing and printing in early modern England. She is also Affiliated Faculty with the Classics Department at the University of Georgia.

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