Before Disability is a literary, legal, and cultural history of disability, race, and citizenship between the Revolution and the Civil War. It shows how disability helped to shape US citizenship as it developed as well as how the formation of US citizenship, in turn, fundamentally shaped disability.
Paper Intimacies in the Early Modern Lyric explores how everyday Renaissance practices of folding, sending, archiving, and arranging manuscript poetry informed how their authors, including John Donne and William Shakespeare, imagined possibilities for nearness and desire.
Scorn, Shame, and the Simple Reader reveals how the emotional language in texts intended for solitary women became the foundation for a medieval Christian reading public. The story of the simple reader provides a new perspective on reading, gender, and identity at the intersection of religious rule and literary fiction.
The Atlantic Republic of Letters offers an alternative intellectual history of early America. Situating Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia in the context of a broader Atlantic intellectual world, it shows how early American intellectuals helped to devise and put into practice colonialism.
Frederick Douglass’s Newspapers offers a detailed history of the newspapers that Frederick Douglass edited during his lifetime and highlights how his periodicals were collective productions. Benjamin Fagan places Black organizing at the center of the story of Douglass’s newspapers, and his newspapers at the center of the story of Black organizing.
Carceral Institutions and Humanist Culture in Early Modern England
Matthew Ritger
Price: $65.00
ISBN: 9781512828993
Pub Date: April 2026
Format: Hardcover
288 Pages
Examining how the work of writers including More, Shakespeare, and Milton dealt with humanism’s entanglements with these new prisons, Houses of Correction constructs the first book-length literary history of some of early modern Europe’s most influential carceral institutions.
In Extinction and the Human Timothy Sweet ponders the realities of animal extinction and endangerment and the often divergent Native American and Euro-American narratives that surround them, focusing especially on the force of human impact on megafauna—mammoths, whales, and the North American bison.
