Professor Joe Moshenska

Photo of Joe Moshenska outside looking to camera.
Professor of English Literature
University College

I’m 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, 2016), Iconoclasm as Child’s Play (Stanford University Press, 2019) and Making Darkness Light: The Lives and Times of John Milton (Basic Books, 2021).  I’m currently co-editing a collection of essays that pair Edmund Spenser's poetry with a series of modern thinkers, and slowly my work on Kenelm Digby's correspondence for OUP.  I’m interested in what Spenser and Milton’s inexhaustible epics do to us as readers; in how early modern literature represents and acts upon bodies and senses; in the writing of renaissance lives and letters; in dialogues between areas of early modern culture, and between early modern and modern thought; and in ways of communicating all the things that make the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries weird and wonderful to audiences beyond the academy. 

 

Fuller details can be found on my Faculty of English webpage, here: https://www.english.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-joseph-moshenska?

You can also read 'Introducing: Dr Joe Moshenska' from May 2018, here.