Ali Madani

firstinitial[+]lastname[at]emory[dot]edu

I am a literary and cultural historian of early modern England and the incoming Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in English at the Stanford Humanities Center. You can view my CV here.

I have broad interests in early modern English literature and culture, as well as in the history of criticism and modern discipline formation. My book project, Categorical Fictions, tracks the aesthetic consequences of modernizing the writing of history and the colonial logics underpinning literary-formal classification. An article drawn from this research appears in ELH. With Megan Cook (Colby College) I am co-editing "Antiquarian Theory and the Foundations of Literary History," a special issue of MLQ.

At Brown, I organized the English Department's Early Modern Working Group and annual lecture (2017-2020). I was a founding board member of the Center for the Study of the Early Modern World (2019), and I led the Center's interdisciplinary graduate colloquium (2017-2019). For 2019-2020, I was an Interdisciplinary Opportunity Fellow jointly at the John Hay Library and the Center for the Study of the Early Modern World.

My research has been funded by the Charlotte Beebe Wilbour Fellowship in Oratory English at Brown, the Benjamin Franklin Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, and grants from the Renaissance Society of America, the Folger Institute, and the Shakespeare Association of America, which recently shorlisted "Questionable Histories and the Aesthetics of Historiography from Shakespeare to Milton" for the 2024 J. Leeds Barroll Dissertation Prize.

Publications:

• "Germany is not Hamlet": The New Variorum Shakespeare from Matter to Ideal. In revision.
• Historical Views and Colonial Form: Spenser's A View in Time and Matter. Solicited contribution for Literary Form after Matter, an essay collection edited by Dianne Mitchell and Katherine Hunt. Submitted.
• Review of Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Knowledge (Debapriya Sarkar, Penn Press 2023) for Modern Philology 121.4 (Winter 2023): 265.
• Merry Wives, Directed by Saheem Ali, Adapted by Jocelyn Bioh. New York City Shakespeare in the Park, July 6 to September 18 2021. Shakespeare Bulletin 40.1 (Spring 2022): 152-156.
• Literary-Historical Giants: Writing the Deep Past from Poly Olbion to Paradise Lost. ELH 87.4 (Winter 2020): 943-967.

Selected Recent and Upcoming Talks:

• Africa with and without History: Racializing Genre in Cymbeline and Lear. April 2024.
• Generic Intent: Lear and Cymbeline. MLA, Philadelphia. January 2024.
• 'Germany is not Hamlet': The NVS from Workbook to Digital Platform. Shakespeare Association of America, Jacksonville. April 2022.
• Historiographical Conjecture: Between Poetry and History in Early Modern England. Scientiae, Amsterdam. June 2021.
• Metaphysical Poetry and Misogynist Aesthetics. ACLA, Montreal. April 2021.
• Imagining the Premodern Past: Historiography Across the Modern Divide (roundtable organizer and discussant). RSA, Digital. April 2021.
• Sifted Histories (invited panelist). Shakespeare Association of America, Austin. March 2021.
• Britain's Literary-Historical Giants. The Politics of Form in Early Modern Europe, Universite Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3. June 2019.



Photo credit: Sophia van Dyk. Thanks to Harvey Lederman for sharing his style sheet.