Jean Feerick

Background

Dr. Feerick is Professor of English and specializes in Renaissance literature with a focus on Shakespeare and early modern drama. She is the author of Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in the Renaissance (2010) and co-editor of The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature (2012). Her research on premodern race, transatlanticism, literature and science, and ecocriticism has appeared in many journals and volumes, includingThe Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science (2017), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment (2016), The Routledge Research Companion to Shakespeare and Classical Literature (2017), A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies (2017), Renaissance Drama (2023), among others. Feerick’s current research investigates the elemental underpinnings of human identity in early modern literature and applies an ecocritical approach in order to draw out early modern views on nature and the natural world.

Areas of Expertise

Dr. Feerick is a Shakespearean and a scholar of early modern literature with a particular interest in and focus on Renaissance drama, the literature surrounding early English colonial efforts, and writings across a range of genres about the natural world and the rise of empirical science. Her scholarship also engages Spenser's epic poem and its relation to the colonization of Ireland, as well as utopian works by writers like More, Bacon, and Cavendish.

Research Interests

Dr. Feerick's work has grappled with how early conceptions of embodied identity inform premodern theories of race, rank, and ethnicity. She has examined the impact that writers afford factors like climate and geography, bloodline and descent, and diet in shaping collective identity. Her work examines the impact that colonial migration -- to the Americas, the East and West Indies, and Ireland -- had on how English writers conceived of racial identity. Recently, her work has investigated how early moderns understood human identity to be deeply imbricated in the natural world and seeks to draw out conceptual differences between these earlier views and modern ideologies.

Education

Dr. Feerick completed her Ph.D. in English Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where she won a teaching award, after earning an M.Phil. degree at the University of Oxford in England, after receiving a full-tuition, academic scholarship as an Allbritton scholar. She completed a Bachelors of Art with a major in English and a minor in philosophy and Spanish at Georgetown University, where she graduated with summa cum laude honors and as the valedictorian of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Courses Taught

First Year Writing (EN 1250)

Introduction to Short Fiction (Humanities course) (EN 2020)

Captives and Castaways in the Atlantic World (linked course) (EN 2612)

Dreamworlds: Utopia, then and now (ISJ course) (EN 1610)

Major British Writers (Humanities course) (EN 2140)

Shakespeare’s Game of Thrones (linked course) (EN 2610)

Introduction to Shakespeare (EN 2220)

Literature of the Stuart Era until the Civil War (EN 3210)

The Green Renaissance (EN 3990)

The Ties that Bind: Revenge in Renaissance Drama (EN 4210)

Adapting Shakespeare: Film and Novel (EN 4220)

Eco-Shakespeare (EN 4220)

Studies in African American Literature (EN 4720)

Globalism and Renaissance Drama (EN 5800)

Ecocritical Renaissance (EN 5800)

Race and Place in Renaissance Literature (EN 5800)

Publications

Books:

The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, Jean Feerick and Vin Nardizzi, eds. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). ISBN: # 978-0230-3404-73.

Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in the Renaissance (University of Toronto Press, 2010). ISBN: # 978-1442-6414-02

Peer-reviewed articles:

“Cosmic Conversions and Timon’s Block,” Renaissance Drama, special forum on “Affective Ecology,” 51.2 (2023), 202-22.

“Economies of Nature in Shakespeare,” special forum on “Shakespeare and Ecology,” ed. Julian Yates and Garrett Sullivan, Shakespeare Studies 39 (2011), 32-42.

“Tragicomic Transformations: Passion, Politics and the ‘Art to Turn’ in Fletcher’s Island Princess,” Special Issue: “Shakespeare and Embodiment,” ed. David McInnis and Brett D. Hirsch, Early Modern Literary Studies 19 (2009), 3.1-24. <URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/emlshome.html>.

“Botanical Shakespeares: The Racial Logic of Plant Life in Titus Andronicus,” Special Issue: Shakespeare & Science, edited by Carla Mazzio, South Central Review 26.1 (March, 2009), 82-102.

“‘Divided by soyle’: Plantation and Degeneracy in The Tempest and The Sea Voyage,” Renaissance Drama 35 (2006), 27-54.

“The Alien Forms of Race in Early Modern England,” Letters: The Semiannual Newsletter of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities 14, 21 (2006): 1-4.

“‘A Nation Now Degenerate’: Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, Nova Britannia, and the Role of Diet and Climate in Reproducing Races,” Early American Studies 1,2 (2003): 30-70.

“Spenser, Race, and Ireland,” English Literary Renaissance 32 1 (2002): 85-117.

Peer-reviewed chapters:

“Feeling Cosmic: Agentic Materialism in Titus Andronicus and Macbeth” in The Oxford Handbook to Shakespeare and the Natural World, ed. Todd Borlik and Karen Raber (forthcoming 2026).

“Matter, nature, cosmos: The scientific art of the early modern stage” in The Arden Handbook to Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama: Perspectives on Culture, Performance and Identity, ed. Michelle Dowd and Tom Rutter (Arden, 2023), 201-217.

“Race, Environment, and Culture: ‘Custome into Nature’ in the Early Modern Atlantic World” in A Cultural History of Race in the Reformation and the Enlightenment (1550-1760): Volume 4, ed. Nicholas Hudson, 6 vols., gen ed. Marius Turda (Bloomsbury Press, 2021), 33-54.

“Race and Colonization” in A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies, ed. John Lee (John Wiley & Sons, 2017), 43-56.

“Shakespeare and classical cosmology” in The Routledge Research Companion to Shakespeare and Classical Literature, ed. Sean Keilen and Nick Moschovakis (Routledge, 2017), 171-89.

“Poetic Science: Wonder and the Seas of Cognition in Bacon and Pericles” in The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science, ed. Howard Marchitello and Evelyn Tribble (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 423-444.

“The Imperial Graft: Horticulture, Hybridity, and the Art of Mingling Races in Henry V and Cymbeline” in A Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, Race, ed. Valerie Traub (Oxford University Press, 2016), 211-27.

“‘Rude Uncivill Blood’: The Pastoral Challenge to Hereditary Race in Fletcher and Milton” in The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500-1900, ed. Ralph Bauer, Kimberly Anne Coles, Zita Nunes, and Carla L. Peterson (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 65-83.

“Groveling with Earth in Kyd and Shakespeare’s Historical Tragedies” in The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature,” Jean Feerick and Vin Nardizzi, eds. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 231-52.

Co-authored with Vin Nardizzi, “Introduction: Swervings: On Human Indistinction,” The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 1-12.