Denise Albanese

Denise Albanese

Professor

affect and politics; problems in mass culture and popular culture; science and technology studies; critical historicism and the contemporary moment; Shakespeare in public culture; Milton and early modern literature

Denise Albanese is Professor of English and Cultural Studies and past director of the Cultural Studies Ph.D. program. She received her doctorate in English Renaissance literature from Stanford University and her BA (with a double major in physics and English) from New York University. She has held fellowships (long-and short-term) from Wesleyan University, the Huntington Library, and the Folger Shakespeare Library; she has also been a Visiting Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University. 

Author of Extramural Shakespeare (Palgrave, 2010) and New Science, New World (Duke University Press, 1996), Albanese has also published on affect and aesthetics; Tudor-Stuart mathematics; Shakespeare in performance; and the place of literature in cultural studies. She regularly teaches courses in affect and politics; mass culture; the histories of cultural studies; Shakespeare, Milton, and other early modern writing; critical and literary theory; and the cultural study of science and technology. Currently she is working on two projects: one a study of neoliberalism and the Santa Fe Institute; and another on affect, media, and Shakespeare as a public object.

Selected Publications

 

"Identification, Alienation, and Hating the Renaissance."
Shakespeare and the 99%: Literary Studies, the Profession, and the Production of Inequity, eds. Sharon O'Dair and Timothy Francisco (London and NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) 19-36.

“Feeling Shakespeare”
An Oxford Handbook on Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, ed. Valerie Traub (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016) 738-752.
 
“The Literary: Cultural Capital and the Specter of Elitism” 
The Renewal of Cultural Studies, ed. Paul Smith (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011) 53-62.

Extramural Shakespeare. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

"School for Scandal?: New Media Hamlet, Olivier, and Camp Connoisseurship." Renaissance Drama 34 (2005): 185-208.

"The Popular Mechanics of Rude Mechanicals: Shakespeare and the Walls of Academe." Shakespeare Studies 32 (2004): 295-321.

"Mathematics as a Social Formation: Mapping the Early Modern Universal." The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England. Ed. Henry S. Turner. New York: Routledge, 2002. 255-73.

(co-editor). The Instruction of a Christen Woman, by Juan Luis Vives. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001.

"The Shakespeare Film and the Americanization of Culture." Marxist Shakespeares. Ed. Jean Howard and Scott Shershow. New York: Routledge, 2000. 206-26.

New Science, New World. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1996.

Courses Taught

CULT 860: Reading Form, Reading Politics

CULT 860: Affect and Politics

CULT 860: Historicism in Cultural Studies

CULT 860: Mass and Popular Culture: Histories, Theories, and Debates

CULT 804: Histories of Cultural Studies, Part II

CULT 816: Cultural Study of Science and Technology

ENGH 676: Introduction to Cultural Studies

ENGH 630: Shakespearean Adaptations

ENGH 551: Literary Theory and Criticism

ENGH 511: Shakespearean Adaptations

ENGH 408: Milton

ENGH 325: 17th Century Poetry and Prose

ENGH 332: Shakespeare

ENGL 323: Topics in Shakespeare

 

 

Recent Presentations

"Shakespeare Beyond the R1 University"

Plenary roundtable at the Shakespeare Association of America, Los Angeles, April 2018

 

"Alienation and Identification"

Modern Language Association conference, NY, NY January 2018

 

"The Epistemology of Neoliberalism: The Santa Fe Institute"

Cultural Studies Association national conference, Irvine, CA, June 2015

 

Dissertations Supervised

Erin Aust, Books in Public: Recognition of Evaluative Discourses in Popular Reading (2023)

Richard T. Stafford, Misplaced Hopes, Dysfunctional Attachments, and Unplanned Energy Transitions: The Role of Clean Coal Discourse in the Cultivation of Energy Communitarianism Along the Ohio River (2022)

Christina Kappel, Adult Girls: Televisual Female Author-Stars’ Power, Freedoms, and Feminisms (2020)

Kayla Keener, The Affect of Labor: The Production of Authenticity and Intimacy in Etsy, Kiva and Twitch (2020)

Sara Massee, The American Historical Imaginary: Memory, Wealth, and Privilege in American Mass Culture (2018)

Daniel Anderson, What is Enlightenment?: Mindfulness in the Moment of Stress (2016)

Kristin Scott, The "Digital City": A Critical Examination of the Discursive Practices of Urban Digitality in Three U.S. Cities (2015)

Jennifer Miller, Diminished Citizenship: A Genealogy of the Development of ‘Soft Citizenship’ at the Intersection of Mass and Political Culture (2014)