About
Scholarship
Joseph Campana serves as the William Shakespeare Professor of English at Rice University. His early modern scholarship begins with an attention not only to poetry but to the forms, poetics, and aesthetics of pain, gender and sexuality, iconoclasm, childhood, natural history, environment, and energy. He has published essays in PMLA, Modern Philology, ELH, Shakespeare, and elsewhere. He is the author of The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity (Fordham, 2012), and Speculations on Sovereignty: Shakespeare’s Once and Future Child (Chicago, 2024.)
Of late many projects emerge from attention to at a time in early modern history of climatic instability many refer to as the Little Ice Age. Often his work considers how traditionally literary or aesthetic categories—like form, genre, and media—and histories of ecological concepts still inform broader kinds of environmental thinking. Recent projects consider early modern understandings of humanity, creaturely life, personhood, scale, affect, waste, energy, and other concerns refracted through a range of arts and media, from poetry and theater to political theory and natural history. Recently published essays treat a range of figurations of creaturely life in early modern England--busy bees, bleeding trees, and crocodile tears and form the basis for two projects: Living Figures: Person and Population in Early Modern England and Scales of Nature: Thinking with Bees in the Renaissance.
Monographs
Politicians are fond of saying that “children are the future.” How did the child become a figure for our political hopes? Shakespeare's Once and Future Child locates the source of this idea in transformations of childhood and political sovereignty during the age of Shakespeare, changes spectacularly dramatized by the playwright himself. Shakespeare’s works feature far more child figures—and more politically entangled children—than other literary or theatrical works of the era. Campana delves into this rich corpus to show how children and childhood expose assumptions about the shape of an ideal polity, the nature of citizenship, the growing importance of population and demographics, and the question of what is or is not human. As our ability to imagine viable futures on our planet feels ever more limited, and as children take up legal proceedings to sue on behalf of the future, it behooves us to understand the way past child figures haunt our conversations about intergenerational justice. Shakespeare offers critical precedents for questions we still struggle to answer.
Spenser’s era grappled with England’s precarious political position in a world tense with religious strife and fundamentally transformed by the doctrinal and cultural sea changes of the Reformation, which had serious implications for how masculinity, affect, and corporeality would be experienced and represented. The Pain of Reformation argues that Edmund Spenser’s 1590 Faerie Queene represents an extended meditation on emerging notions of physical, social, and affective vulnerability in Renaissance England. Histories of violence, trauma, and injury have dominated literary studies, often obscuring vulnerability, or an openness to sensation, affect, and aesthetics that includes a wide range of pleasures and pains. This book approaches early modern sensations through the rubric of the vulnerable body, explores the emergence of notions of shared vulnerability, and illuminates a larger constellation of masculinity and ethics. The underside of representations of violence in Spenser’s poetry was a contemplation of the precarious lives of subjects in post-Reformation England.
Poetry
Joseph Campana is the author of three collections of poetry: The Book of Faces (Graywolf, 2005), Natural Selections (2012), which received the Iowa Poetry Prize, and The Book of Life (Tupelo, 2019). Poems appear in Slate, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Conjunctions, Colorado Review, Plume and more. He is the recipient of prizes from Prairie Schooner and The Southwest Review and grants from the NEA, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Houston Arts Alliance. He serves as contributing editor at Plume for which he writes a column. Current projects include a collection called The Fruit and the Work which is the basis of an ongoing collaboration with electroacoustic composer Kurt Stallmann.
Praise for The Book of Life:
“Life, like life, had a prior existence, but the iconic weekly news magazine whose images would saturate the country’s visual field was born in 1936, child of the New Deal and the Great Depression. In a brilliant structural proposition, Joseph Campana transforms a family trove of aging magazines into scaffolding for an extended meditation on the contours of self and national community. The writing in these pages is as sensuous and meticulous as the photographs it takes for prompts: ‘corn silk / and the squawk / of husking ears,’ ‘lawnmowers ripping / to life.’ But it is also much more: a questing, trenchant portrait of the perishable life we depend upon one another to sustain.” —Linda Gregerson, Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor, Department of English, University of Michigan
“In poems that enact the heady rush of history, what we mean when we say “my life flashed before my eyes,” Joseph Campana gives us the world in swooning context. The Book of Life is at once an ecstatic accounting, a love poem ‘to love/what you can’t understand,’ an elegy for not only what is gone but also for what is steadily going. ‘That was/what lured me,’ he writes: ‘the song of the world disappearing before me….’ These poems are a marvel the way life itself is a marvel.” —Natasha Trethewey, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2012-2014
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Editing
Connecting Renaissance humanism to the variety of “critical posthumanisms” in twenty-first-century literary and cultural theory, Renaissance Posthumanism (Fordham, 2016) reconsiders traditional languages of humanism and the human, not by nostalgically enshrining or triumphantly superseding humanisms past but rather by revisiting and interrogating them. What if today’s “critical posthumanisms,” even as they distance themselves from the iconic representations of the Renaissance, are in fact moving ever closer to ideas in works from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century? What if “the human” is at once embedded and embodied in, evolving with, and de-centered amid a weird tangle of animals, environments, and vital materiality? Seeking those patterns of thought and practice, contributors to this collection focus on moments wherein Renaissance humanism looks retrospectively like an uncanny “contemporary”—and ally—of twenty-first-century critical posthumanism.
Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance: Insects and Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance: Concepts (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023) of the Renaissance examines literary and cultural texts from early modern England in order to understand how people in that era thought about—and with—insect and arachnid life. Designed for the classroom, the book comprises two volumes—Insects and Concepts—that can be used together or independently. Each addresses the collaborative, multigenerational research that produced early modern natural history and provides new insights into the old question of what it means to be human in a world populated by beasts large and small.
For over a decade, I served as Editor, 1500-1659 of SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, during which time the journal won the Voyager Award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) for excellence covering the period between 1500 and 1800. For SEL he has edited a series of special issues: “Staging Allegory” (55.2: Spring 2015), “After Sovereignty” (Winter 2018), and "Shakespeare’s Waters” (59.2: Spring 2019), and with Ayesha Ramachandran "World, Globe, Planet" (62.1: Winter 2022).
Arts Writing
Campana has also served as an arts writer and critic for web and print publications (including CultureMap, Houston Chronicle, Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books) covering theater, dance, visual arts, television, books and more. This writing has in turn infused his scholarly writing resulting in several essays on choreographic adaptations of Shakespeare (“Of Dance and Disarticulation: Juliet Dead and Alive” & “Dancing Will: The Case of Romeo and Juliet”) and on reality television (“Picking, Pawning, Hoarding, and Storing: Archiving America on Reality TV” with Theodore Bale).
Environmental Studies
Campana directs Rice University's Center for Environmental Studies, which is a place where humanists, artists, architects and social scientists come together to conduct research and teaching about the most pressing questions of an era lived in the shadow of massive climate instability and environmental turmoil. The CES works in conversation with colleagues in the natural sciences and engineering but with approaches that consider the profoundly social and cultural nature of our embeddedness in the Earth’s many complex living systems. We also work closely with a range of community partners and environemtnal advocates. As part of that work he co-directs the Environmental Studies curriculum, where he has taught ENST 100: Environment, Culture, and Society, as well as graduate courses on the environmental humanities. He has been a PI on "Diluvial Houston" a grant funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. And he is on the governing board of the Rice Sustainability Institute, where he is launcuing a new arts, media, and engagement community hub called EcoStudio.