Background
John Kuhn is a specialist in the literature and history of 17th-century England and its colonies. At Binghamton, you can find him teaching the English department’s big Shakespeare lecture, as well as classes on early modern drama, the colonization of the Americas, 17th-century New York, and the period’s beautiful, varied and often vexing poetry.
His first book, Making Pagans: Theatrical Practice and Comparative Religion in Early Modern England (UPenn), provided a new history of the connections between the industrial practices of the public theater (the era’s dominant popular entertainment medium) and the emerging disciplines of ethnography and comparative religion. He has also written extensively and miscellaneously about the poetry of George Herbert, with whom he has a long-running love-hate relationship.
His new work extends his interest in the 17th-century Americas. He is at work on a somewhat messy series of essays about the impacts and intercultural movements of Indigenous technology in Europe and the Americas: hammocks, featherwork and, most of all, the birchbark canoe.
Kuhn accepts graduate students working in any area of early modern studies. He is an active member of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, as well as the Material and Visual Worlds interdepartmental working group. He is on sabbatical leave in the 2024-2025 academic year.
Publications
Book
Making Pagans: Theatrical Practice and Comparative Religion in Early Modern England University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024.
Journal Articles
with Carolyn Arena, “’Strange American Flies’: Oroonoko and the Royal Society’s Early Surinamese Collections, Restoration (Sept 2024).
“New Light on Milton as Landowner and Landlord: a Previously Unknown Manuscript Rental Agreement from 1663 in the Portland Papers,” Milton Quarterly (Dec 2023).
“Clipping Easter’s Wing: Lorine Niedecker and the Metaphysical Lyric,” Modern Philology (November 2023).
“Inimitable Rarities?: Feather Costumes, Indigenous Artistic Labor and Early Modern English Theater History,” Shakespeare, 19:1 (Spring 2023).
“George Herbert’s “The Water-Course” and the Early Modern Inscribed Epitaph,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 (Spring 2022).
with LG Gibson (St. Joseph’s), “James Leeke, George Herbert, and the Neo-Latin Contexts of “The Church Militant,” Humanistica Lovaniensia: The Journal of Neo-Latin Studies (September 2018).
“Sejanus, the King’s Men Altar Scenes, and the Theatrical Production of Paganism,” Early Theatre (December 2017).
“To Give Like a Priest: Riot, Dearth, and the Reformation of Charity in Herbert's Wiltshire,” English Literary Renaissance (Spring 2016).
Book Chapters
“Left Behind: George Herbert, Eschatology, and the Stuart Atlantic, 1606-1634” in Prophecy and Eschatology in the Transatlantic World, 1500-1800, ed. Andrew Crome (Palgrave, 2016).
Education
- PhD, Columbia University
- BA, University of Kansas (summa cum laude)
Research Interests
- 16th- and 17th-century English literature and history
Teaching Interests
- Drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries
- 17th-century poetry
- Literature and history of early European expansion into the Atlantic
