Professional Summary
Joanna Huh is an Assistant Professor of early modern literature and culture and an affiliate faculty member of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. She received her dual B.A. in English and Biology from Cornell University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University, where her dissertation earned the Robert Manson Myers Award for best dissertation in English in 2020. Her work and teaching focus on early modern English drama, queer and anti-racist approaches to Shakespeare, and (early) modern theories of community and selfhood.
Her current project, Damaging Intimacy: Reimagining Communities in Shakespeare and Marlowe, explores the portrayal, in Renaissance texts as well as in early modern and current political theory, of how radical risk-taking and vulnerability can form the basis for community. Damaging Intimacy works to disrupt the narrative that as the subject becomes more modern, the subject becomes more bounded and then joins a community in order to protect those bounds. As an alternative, she envisions communities that are dependent on selves willing to embrace experiences, both costly and pleasurable, offered by unprotected existence. At a juncture consumed with security, protection, and boundaries, her work rethinks radical ways of being and belonging that reimagines new visions of how to ethically share life with others.
Education
Ph.D.: Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN, 2020 (English Literature and Language)
M.A.: Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN, 2017 (English Literature and Language)
B.A.: Cornell University Ithaca, NY, 2014 (English Literature; Concentration: Shakespeare and Renaissance Studies)
B.A.: Cornell University Ithaca, NY, 2014 (Biological Sciences)
Publications
Peer Reviewed Publications
Joanna Huh "He Grows Kind": Reimagining Community in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice .Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, , (Forthcoming) ,
Presentations
Paper Presentations
(2022. ) Coauthoring the Early Modern Period: Shakespeare with a Difference .Minneapolis, MN.
(2020. ) "He razeth all his foes with fire and sword": The Politics of Gift Exchange in Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great .Santa Barbara, CA.
(2019. ) Glimpsing Medusa's Head: Confronting the Body of Lavinia in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus .Toronto, CA.
(2018. ) King Lear and the Wandering Womb .Birmingham, AL.
(2018. ) "Non o lingua et grido: I have no tongue yet cry out": Rethinking Petrarchism, Rereading Lavinia .Atlanta, GA.
(2017. ) "The Hebrew will turn Christian; he grows kind": Reimagining Community in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice .Austin, TX.