Center for the Study of the Early Modern World

James Kuzner is Associate Professor of English. His first book, Open Subjects: English Renaissance Republicans, Modern Selfhoods, and the Virtue of Vulnerability (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), traces a strand of early modern republicanism that can be used to develop conceptions of vulnerable, “open” selfhood outlined in contemporary radical theory. He has just completed his second book, Shakespeare as a Way of Life: Skeptical Practice and the Politics of Weakness (Fordham University Press, 2016), and is at work on a third, called “Metaphysical Freedom,” a study of Donne, the metaphysical imagination, and the experience of counterintuitive liberties. He has published articles on Shakespeare, Milton, and Donne in journals such as Shakespeare Quarterly, Criticism, English Literary History, Exemplaria, and Modern Language Quarterly. Before coming to Brown, Kuzner was Assistant Professor of English at Case Western Reserve University.