Joseph Mansky

Joseph Mansky is Assistant Professor of English at OU, specializing in early modern literature. His first book, Libels and Theater in Shakespeare’s England: Publics, Politics, Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2023), studies the circulation of libels on and off the early modern stage. Ranging from Shakespearean drama to provincial pageantry, the book charts a public sphere poised between debate and defamation, free speech and fake news. He is currently working on a second book, titled Political Representation: A Literary History, 1558-1651, on the rhetorical genealogy of representation in early modern literature and political thought. His work has appeared in a number of scholarly journals, including the Review of English Studies, ELH, PMLA, Shakespeare Quarterly, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, and the Journal of Legal History. Forthcoming essays include an archival study of the curious career of Henry Wright—a virtually unknown alchemist, scholar, and spy who plied his dubious skills at the margins of the early seventeenth-century court—in Huntington Library Quarterly, and a piece on “Shakespeare, Populism, and the Public Sphere” for The Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Politics.

Prof. Mansky has received fellowship and grant support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Renaissance Society of America, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington Library, and the Office of the Vice President for Research and Partnerships and the Arts & Humanities Forum at OU. He received his B.A. from Cornell University and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Before coming to OU, he taught courses at UC Berkeley, the City College of New York (CUNY), and Bard College. For more information, please visit josephmansky.com.

Contact Information:
Email: jmansky@ou.edu

Research and Teaching Interests:
Early modern literature; Shakespeare; law and literature; history of political thought; theater history; rhetoric and poetics; political theory; social history

Book:
Libels and Theater in Shakespeare’s England: Publics, Politics, Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

Articles and Chapters:

“Shakespeare, Populism, and the Public Sphere,” forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Politics.

“Alchemist, Scholar, Spy: The Career of Henry Wright,” forthcoming in Huntington Library Quarterly.

“Rethinking Royalism in Herrick’s Hesperides,” Review of English Studies 73 (2022): 476–89.

“Edward Coke, William West, and the Law of Libel,” Journal of Legal History 42.3 (2021): 328–32.

“The Case of Eleazar Edgar: Leicester’s Commonwealth and the Book Trade in 1604,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 115.2 (2021): 233–41.

“‘Variety’ and Republican Violence in Sidney’s Arcadia,” ELH 86.3 (2019): 587–612.

“‘Look no more’: Jonson’s Catiline and the Politics of Enargeia,” PMLA 134.2 (2019): 332–50.

“Jane Shore, Edward IV, and the Politics of Publicity,” Renaissance Drama 46.2 (2018): 141–65.

“‘Unlawfully published’: Libels and the Public Sphere in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 67.3 (2016): 293–318.

“Does Relation Stand? Textual and Social Relations in Paradise Regain’d,” Milton Studies 56 (2015): 45–72.