Center for the Study of the Early Modern World

Ali John Madani’s dissertation, “Questionable Histories and the Aesthetics of Historiography from Shakespeare to Milton,” examines the appearance of some unstable historical objects and narratives in the cultural production of early modern England. The project seeks to articulate the shifting relations between the (in their modern forms) inchoate categories of the “historical” and the “literary” in borderline cases — chronicle giants, genres of stage drama, universal histories — as material shuttles back and forth between the emergent poles.