Office: 362 EPB Phone: 319-335-0442 E-Mail: Huston-Diehl@uiowa.edu Curriculum Vitae Selected Publications/Projects Courses

Huston Diehl

Early Modern
Literature & Culture

My teaching and scholarship focus on the literature and culture of early modern England, with a particular emphasis on drama, religion, and visual culture. I am especially interested in Elizabethan and Jacobean theater as a cultural institution, the phenomenology of the stage, and the poetics of reform.

In my current project, tentatively titled Reforming Culture: Discipline and Play in the Popular Theater of Early Modern England, I argue that the comedies of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton appropriate the disciplinary practices of early Protestantism and thereby claim a role for theater and play in the construction of the early Protestant subject. I am interested not only in the way these plays stage scenes of conversion, penance, and punishment, but also in the way they employ the wondrous, miraculous, magical, imaginative, and ecstatic for reformative purposes. I have conceived this project as a companion work to my book on Renaissance tragedy, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England. In it, I show how the tragedies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries are deeply informed by the iconoclastic and antitheatrical discourses of early Protestantism, and I examine the way these plays reflexively explore their own power to dazzle, seduce, and deceive, often disrupting and reforming the gaze of their spectators. I am also the author of a reference book, An Index of Icons in English Emblem Books, and I have published essays on English emblem books, Renaissance iconography, Northern European art, and the iconography of the stage. In addition, I am keenly interested in the challenges of teaching early modern literature to undergraduate students, and I have written a number of essays on this subject.

My most recent book is a departure from my scholarly work on the English Renaissance, although it takes its title from Milton.. Dream Not of Other Worlds: Teaching in a Segregated Elementary School, 1970 (available at www.uiowapress.org) is a memoir about my experience teaching in a "Negro" school in rural Virginia in the waning days of the Jim Crow South. In it, I reflect on what my students taught me about bigotry, poverty, and racial identity, and I examine the way their lives were shaped by institutionalized segregation.

At the undergraduate level, I teach a range of courses in sixteenth and seventeenth-century literature, including Shakespeare, English Renaissance Drama, Milton, Literature and Culture of the Renaissance, Literature and Culture of the Seventeenth Century, Seventeenth-Century Lyric, and Renaissance Literature and Art. I have also taught honors seminars on Hamlet and on Early Modern London.

At the graduate level, I teach courses in Early Modern Drama, Shakespeare, Milton, and Seventeenth-Century Poetry. My graduate seminars have explored such topics as the Theatrical Cultures of Early Modern London, Renaissance Tragedy, Renaissance Comedy, Reforming Culture, the Reformation of the Imagination, and Eros and Magic, Witchcraft and Demonology.