Emily Jones

Associate Professor

CONTACT

Office: CPR 358-B
Phone: 813-974-9546
Email

BIO

Emily Griffiths Jones’ research and teaching specializes in the literature of early modern England, with emphasis on Milton, Shakespeare, and women writers. Her first book, Right Romance: Heroic Subjectivity and Elect Community in Seventeenth-Century England, deals with intersections between genre, religion, and politics. The book argues for a recontextualized understanding of romance—as a multi-generic narrative structure or strategy rather than a prose genre, and as a cherished mode for Puritan republicans as well as royalists—and shows how English men and women turned to romance to construct diverse ideological communities for themselves as the chosen heroes of their nation’s turbulent history. Throughout her scholarship, Dr. Jones traces a vibrant literary tradition for anti-royalist writing in the period surrounding the English Civil War, and she explores early modern readers’ and writers’ passionate, playful, and queer emotional investments in texts. Her next book project is on “Early Modern Fandom”: the rise of affective attachment to and identification with literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

FOR PROSPECTIVE GRAD STUDENTS

Dr. Jones is committed to fostering students’ individual interests in early modern literature and genre studies. She has worked with graduate students on a diverse range of projects, including stylometric digital analysis of early modern dramatic genres, deathbed struggles in reformation-era texts, the politics of gender differentiation in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Shakespearean adaptation (in graphic novels, in Asian film, and in rock music), romance as ecofeminist genre in Disney’s Moana, and archival excavation of women playwrights. M.A. or Ph.D. students interested in working with Dr. Jones should begin by scheduling an in-person or virtual meeting to discuss their interests and goals.

EDUCATION

  • Ph.D. and M.A., Boston University
  • B.A., Randolph-Macon Woman's College

AREA OF SPECIALTY

Early modern literature, Milton, Shakespeare, women writers, romance and epic, gender and genre, biblical poetics, literature and seventeenth-century politics

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

  • Right Romance: Heroic Subjectivity and Elect Community in Seventeenth-Century England. Penn State University Press, 2019.

  • “Milton, Cavendish, and the Playful Politics of Authorial Self-Insertion.” For a collection on interconnections between John Milton and Margaret Cavendish, edited by Ann Baynes Coiro, Lara Dodds, and Lisa Walters. Forthcoming.

  • “‘Matching with the accursèd Canaanites’: Lucy Hutchinson’s Foreign Queens, Religious Exogamy, and Race-Making.” For a collection on “Race/Queer/Queens,” edited by Mira Assaf Kafantaris and Urvashi Chakravarty, in Palgrave’s Early Modern Cultural Studies Series. Forthcoming.

  • “Republican Women Writers.” In The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing, edited by Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith. Forthcoming from Palgrave.

  • “Passive Obedience and the Problem of Tyranny in Rivall Friendship.” For a proposed essay collection on Bridget Manningham’s Rivall Friendship, edited by Jean Brink. Forthcoming.

  • “Intimate Creations: Margaret Cavendish and the Violent Desires of Fandom.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 21.3 (2021).

  • “Not sparing Kings in what they did not right’: Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum and the King James Bible.” In Religion and the Early Modern British Marketplace, edited by Kristin Bezio and Scott Oldenburg. Routledge, 2021.

  • “Global Performance and Local Reception: Teaching Hamlet and More in Singapore.” In Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare, edited by Wendy Beth Hyman and Hillary Eklund. Edinburgh University Press, 2019.

  • “Hereditary Succession and Death in Thomas Dekker’s The Wonderful Year and Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy.” SEL 56.2 (2016).

  •  “Beloved of All the Trades in Rome: Oeconomics, Occupation, and the Gendered Body in Coriolanus,” Shakespeare Studies 43 (2015).

  • “‘My Victorious Triumphs Are All Thine’: Romance and Elect Community in Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder,” Studies in Philology 112.1 (2015).

  • “Milton’s Counter-Revision of Romantic Structure in Paradise Regained,” Huntington Library Quarterly 76.1 (2013). Special issue on Paradise Regained edited by John Rogers.