Jesse Lander
Associate Professor
Faculty Fellow at the Nanovic Institute
Areas of study
- Early Modern
- Religion and Literature
Education
Ph.D., Columbia University
B.A., University College, Oxford University
B.A., Columbia College
Research and teaching interests
Shakespeare and early modern drama, histories of the book, religion and literature, intellectual history, history of historiography, textual criticism
Biography
Jesse Lander is interested in the intersection of religion and literary culture in early modern England. He is currently completing a book provisionally entitled Special Affects: Staging the Supernatural in Shakespeare’s Drama. This project combines intellectual history and theater history to provide an account of the technologies used to stage supernatural phenomena in Henry VI, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, Macbeth, Cymbeline, and The Tempest. In addition, he is researching a second book-length project on the history of Shakespeare quotation.
Representative publications
“Passions, Affections and Instinct in The Changeling,” The Changeling: The State of the Play, ed. Gordon McMullan and Kelly Stage (Bloomsbury, 2022), 116-135.
“Maimed Rites and Whirling Words in Hamlet,” Reading Shakespeare and the Bible, ed. Kristen Poole and Thomas Fulton (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 188-203.
King John, with John Tobin, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd Series.London: Bloomsbury, 2018
“Demonism and Disenchantment in The First Part of the Contention,” Enchantment and Dis-enchantment in Early Modern Drama: Wonder, the sacred, and the Supernatural, ed. Nandini Das and Nick Davis. Routledge, 2017, 18-37.
The Book in History, The Book as History: New Intersections of the Material Text, edited with Zachary Lesser and Heidi Brayman. New Haven: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and Yale UP, 2016.