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Katarzyna Lecky

Surtz Associate Professor

Bio

My research focuses on popular forms of intellectual history by studying the early modern publics mapped by cheap print, which constellated around certain catchwords and concepts to define what came to be seen as common and even natural to the national English character. My first book, Pocket Maps and Public Poetry in Renaissance England (Oxford, 2019), shows that the geographical imaginary fueling the cheap print works of mapmakers and poets prompted ordinary consumers to invest in the everyday practices of building the English commonwealth. My second book project, England’s Weedy Renaissance, demonstrates how seventeenth-century cheap print herbals forged a nativist strain of botanical practices and poetics that found in weeds the sturdy constitution of indigenous Englishness. I have also published on archive theory, premodern fictions of naturalization, spatial politics in early America, vegetable virtue ethics, and other topics. My work has earned fellowships from the ACLS and the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Renaissance Society of America, the Institute for Research in the Humanities at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Folger Shakespeare, Huntington, and Newberry Libraries.

Education

  • B.A., University of Notre Dame
  • M.A., Boston College
  • Ph.D., University of Colorado at Boulder

Research Interests

  • Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English/anglophone literature
  • Historical cartography
  • Alternative literacies/numeracyHistory of medicine
  • Print history
  • History of the senses
  • Material cultures
  • Pre-Linnaean botany
  • Virtue ethics
  • Political theology
  • Archival research

Publications/Research Listings

Book:

  • Pocket Maps and Public Poetry in Renaissance England (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Journal Articles and Book Chapters:

  • “Cheap maps, spatial politics, and England’s colonies,” in Cambridge Critical Concepts: Space and Literature, ed. Elizabeth Forrest Evans (Cambridge University Press; forthcoming 2023).
  • “Abraham Cowley’s Six Books of Plants and the Diversification of Textual Authority” in A Critical Companion to Abraham Cowley, eds. Michael Edson and Cedric Reverand (Clemson University Press; forthcoming 2023).
  • "Eudaimonia," Handbook of Shakespearean Ethics, ed. Julia Lupton and Donovan Sherman (Cambridge University Press; forthcoming 2022).
  • “Wetnurse Politics in Spenser’s View and Jones’ Arte and Science,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 47.1 (Spring 2021): 56-72.
  • “The Politics of Mediterranean Marriage in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton,” Gender in the Medieval Mediterranean. Ed. Megan Moore (ACMRS, 2019), 203-33.
  • "Humanizing the Interface" in Disrupting Digital Humanities. Ed. Dorothy Kim and Jesse Stommel (Punctum Books, 2019); anthologized from Hybrid Pedagogy.
  • "Milton's Experienced Eve," Philological Quarterly (PQ) (Fall 2017): 453-74.
  • "Archiving Ordinary Experience in the English Renaissance," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (JMEMS) 47.2 (May 2017): 359-90.
  • “Irish Non-humanness and English Inhumanity in A vewe of the present state of Ireland,” Spenser Studies 30 (2015): 133-50.
  • “How the Iceni Became British: Holinshed's Boudicca and the Rhetoric of Naturalization” in Poets and Scholars Talk About Queens. Ed. Carole Levin (Palgrave, 2015), 55-74.
  • “Naturalization in the Mirror and A Mask,” Studies in English Literature (SEL) 54.1 (Winter 2014): 125-142.