Miriam Jacobson

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.