Jonathan Baldo
Professor of English
Academic Leave Fall 2023
BIOGRAPHY
A faculty member of the Eastman School since 1983 and chair of the department from 1997-2005, Jonathan Baldo holds a B.A. in English from Yale University and a Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo.
His book Memory in Shakespeare’s Histories: Stages of Forgetting in Early Modern England (Routledge, 2012), reflects his ongoing interest in the ways that works of art negotiate conflicting memories of the past and in the prominent role played by forgetting in the construction of nationhood. In addition to numerous articles on Shakespeare and early modern culture, he has also published on Franz Kafka, Gabriel García Márquez, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Ingmar Bergman. His most recent book project explores the importance of children’s games in Shakespeare.
He has been invited to give papers at numerous conferences and universities including those in Munich, Prague, Paris, London, and Stratford-upon-Avon. He enjoys teaching a wide range of topics, from Shakespeare to romanticism, modern and contemporary poetry, and film. In 2011, he was awarded the University of Rochester’s Edward Peck Curtis Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, and in 2014, Eastman’s Eisenhart Award for Excellence in Teaching: honors that he is glad to share with the intellectually dynamic and curious students of the Eastman School of Music.
WORKS AND PUBLICATIONS
Books
Memory and Affect in Shakespeare’s England, co-editor with Isabel Karremann (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2022)
Forms of Faith: Literary Form and Religious Conflict in Early Modern England, co-editor with Isabel Karremann (Manchester University Press, 2017)
Memory in Shakespeare’s Histories: Stages of Forgetting in Early Modern England (Routledge, 2012).
The Unmasking of Drama: Contested Representation in Shakespearean Tragedy (Wayne State University Press, 1996).
Articles
“Spiritual Accountancy in the Age of Shakespeare,” in Memory and Mortality in Renaissance England, ed. William Engel, Rory Loughnane, and Grant Williams (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press, 2022)
“‘Must I remember?’: The Burden of the Past Tense in Hamlet,” in The Shakespearean Death Arts: Hamlet Among the Tombs, Palgrave Shakespeare Studies, ed. William Engel and Grant Williams (forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
“What’s in a Game?: Handy-Dandy, War, and Foreign Relations in King Lear,” in Performing Shakespearean Appropriations: A Festschrift in Honor of Christy Desmet, ed. Darlene Ciraulo, Matthew Kozusko, and Robert Sawyer (forthcoming, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press/Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)
“Memory Traces in The Reign of King Edward III,” Humanities, special issue on Nationalism in Early Modern Literature, ed. Christopher Ivic (forthcoming, 2021)
“‘If a lie may do thee grace’: Shifts of Memory in Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy,” in Paradigm Shifts During the Global Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Albrecht Classen (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2019), 339-354.
“Fatal Distraction: eclipses of memory in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra,” in The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Memory, ed. Andrew Hiscock and Lina Perkins Wilder (London: Routledge, 2018), 149-62.
“Economic Nationalism in Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice,” in Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance 13 (28) (2016): 51-67.
“Well-divided Dispositions: Distraction, Dying, and the Eroticism of Forgetting in Antony and Cleopatra,” in Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England: Literature and the Erotics of Recollection, ed. John S. Garrison and Kyle Pivetti, Routledge Series in Renaissance Literature and Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 2016): 159-76.
“Recovering Medieval Memory in Shakespeare’s Pericles.” South Atlantic Review, vol. 79, no. 3-4 (2015): 171-89.
“Shakespeare’s Art of Distraction,” Shakespeare: Journal of the British Shakespeare Association 10.2 (2014): 138-57.
“Shakespeare’s Historical Sublime,” in Forgetting Faith?: Negotiating Confessional Conflict in Early Modern Europe, ed. Isabel Karremann, Cornel Zwierlein, and Inga Mai Groote, Pluralisierung und Autorität, Band 29 (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2012), 81-98.
“The Greening of Will Shakespeare,” in Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3:2 (Spring/summer, 2008).
“‘Into a thousand parts’: Representing the Nation in Henry V,” English Literary Renaissance 38 (Winter, 2008), 55-82.
“’A rooted sorrow’: Scotland’s Unusable Past,” in Macbeth: New Critical Essays, ed. Nick Moschovakis (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), 88-103.
“Forgetting Elizabeth in Henry VIII,” in Resurrecting Elizabeth I in Seventeenth-Century England, edited by Elizabeth H. Hageman and Katherine Conway, (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007) 132-148.
HUMANITIES
