Joe Moshenska

Joe Moshenska is a visiting professor at Barnard during the 2026-7 academic year. He is Professor of English at the University of Oxford, UK, and a fellow of University College. He is also the author of four books: Feeling Pleasures: The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England (OUP, 2014); A Stain in the Blood: The Remarkable Voyage of Sir Kenelm Digby (William Heinemann, 2017), which was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Iconoclasm as Child’s Play (Stanford University Press, 2019); and Making Darkness Light: The Lives and Times of John Milton (Basic Books, 2021), which was a New York Times Editor’s Pick.  He also edited, with David Hillman and Namratha Rao, the special issue of Spenser Studies titled Companionable Thinking: Spenser With… (2023).  His articles have appeared in English Literary History, Modern Philology, PMLA, and elsewhere. He received his BA from the University of Cambridge and his PhD from Princeton University.  

Professor Moshenska’s teaching and research are focused on sixteenth and seventeenth century literature and culture, but with frequent forays into earlier and later periods.  Much of his writing has returned, one way or another, to Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene and John Milton’s Paradise Lost.  He also has longstanding interests in critical theory and in connections between literature and related fields, including the histories of philosophy and science, art history, psychoanalysis, and anthropology.  He enjoys both writing academic research and presenting ideas to wider audiences, via frequent work for BBC Radio and essays and reviews on a range of topics for The Guardian, The Financial Times, The New York Review of Books and elsewhere.

Much of Professor Moshenska’s recent research has been collaborative.  With a group of three colleagues he is finishing a co-written book titled Styles of Being: Early Modern Ontologies Now, which makes connections between early modern culture and recent anthropology, especially the body of writing known as the ‘Ontological Turn,’ associated with the work of Marilyn Strathern, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and others.  He has also been investigating the connections between what are conventionally seen as critical and creative modes of writing, and is interested to explore with students and colleagues the range of forms, tones and voices available to us.  A book of essays towards this end – Creating Renaissance Criticism, co-edited with Leah Whittington (Harvard) – is forthcoming in 2027 from Oxford University Press.

During his year at Barnard, Professor Moshenska will be aiming to complete his fifth monograph, which is on the seventeenth century Dutch philosopher Benedict or Baruch Spinoza and his impact on a series of great literary writers from George Eliot and Gustave Flaubert to Clarice Lispector and Saul Bellow.  His aim will be to find a shape for this book which does justice to the simultaneous weightiness and lightness of Spinoza’s thought.  He will also be aiming to make headway on a new edition of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice for Cambridge Shakespeare Editions, co-edited with David Hillman.  He is looking forward to discussing ideas with a new array of students and colleagues.