John Kuhn

Director; Associate Professor

The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH); Department of English

Background

John Kuhn teaches, reads, and writes about the literature and history of 17th-century England and its colonies. At Binghamton, he teaches the English department’s big Shakespeare lecture, as well as courses on the colonization of the Americas, 17th-century New York, Renaissance drama, 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 and the emerging disciplines of ethnography and comparative religion. It won ASTR’s field-wide Barnard Hewitt Prize, given annually to the best book in theater studies; the Claire Sponsler First Book Prize (MRDS); and was short-listed for the Phyllis Goodhart Prize for best book in Renaissance studies (RSA). His other articles have ranged widely across 17th-century literature and history, with a particular focus on the generic and social contexts that informed George Herbert’s work and on the complicated afterlives of his poetry and reputation.

His new work extends his long-running interest in the 17th-century Americas and in material culture. He has recently published a series of essays about the impacts and intercultural movements of Indigenous technology in early modern Europe and the Americas (focusing on featherwork and hammocks), and is working on a book about the complicated, entangled Indigenous and colonial histories of the birchbark canoe in early modern North America. He is also, separately, editing Volumes 5 and 6 (Plays: English and Latin) of the newly reanimated , as well as serving on the editorial board for the larger project.

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 and the Material and Visual Worlds interdepartmental working group. He is also the current director of IASH, Binghamton’s humanities center, and in that capacity is always happy to discuss new opportunities for humanities programming across the university and in the greater Binghamton area.

Publications

Book

Making Pagans: Theatrical Practice and Comparative Religion in Early Modern England University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024.

Journal Articles

with Marcy Norton, “Towards a History of the Hammock, an Indigenous Technology in the Early Modern World,” postmedieval (Sept 2025)
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

“Holy, Racy, Grotesque: George Herbert’s 19^th-Century Reception,” forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of George Herbert (Oxford, 2028).
“The Emperor’s Hammock: Indigenous Technology and Roman Historiography in Ravenscroft’s Titus Andronicus,” forthcoming in Imagining Antiquity in Shakespeare’s England, eds. Heather James and Andrew Wallace (Palgrave, 2026).
“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

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