Jonathan Baldo

Jonathan Baldo

  • Professor of English, Department of Humanities, Eastman School of Music

PhD, State University of New York at Buffalo

Office Location
606 Eastman Theater
Telephone
(585) 274-1610

Curriculum Vitae

Research Overview

A specialist in Shakespeare and early modern studies, Jonathan Baldo regularly offers courses in Elizabethan and Jacobean Shakespeare and Shakespeare's history plays. A secondary interest in twentieth-century literature and culture has led him to develop courses in modern and contemporary poetry and film studies, and seminars on James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison at the Eastman School of Music. At the River Campus, he has offered graduate courses in the romantic movement and the theory of the novel for the departments of English and Modern Languages and Cultures, respectively.

His most recent book explores ways in which both a growing sense of nationhood and the Protestant Reformation challenged accepted ways of construing remembering and forgetting in Shakespeare’s second sequence of history plays. His other recent work links parliamentary and theatrical representation in Shakespeare's histories.  A forthcoming collection of essays co-edited with Isabel Karremann, Forms of Faith:  Literary Form and Religious Conflict in Early Modern England, explores ways in which textual and dramatic works staged the suspension of religious allegiances and adopted a pragmatic rather than polemical handling of religious plurality.

Research Interests

  • Shakespeare
  • early modern cultural studies
  • literary theory

Selected Publications

Books and Journal Articles

  • "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 (forthcoming, Routledge, November 30, 2015)
  • "Shakespeare’s Art of Distraction," ShakespeareJournal of the British Shakespeare Association 10.2 (2014):  138-57.
  • Memory in Shakespeare's Histories: Stages of Forgetting in Early Modern England, Routledge 2012
  • "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 29, De Gruyter 2011, 81-98
  • "'A rooted sorrow': Scotland's Unusable Past," in Macbeth: New Critical Essays, ed. Nick Moschovakis, Routledge 2008, 88-103
  • "'Into a thousand parts': Representing the Nation in Henry V," in English Literary Renaissance 38 (2008), 55-82
  • "The Greening of Will Shakespeare," in Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3.2 (spring/summer 2008) [online journal]
  • The Unmasking of Drama: Contested Representation in Shakespearean Tragedy, Wayne State 1996
  • "Forgetting Elizabeth in Henry VIII," in Resurrecting Elizabeth I in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Elizabeth H. Hageman and Katherine Conway, Fairleigh Dickinson 2007, 132-48
  • "Necromancing the Past in Henry VIII," in English Literary Renaissance 34.3 (autumn 2004), 359-86
  • "Solitude as an Effect of Language in Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad," in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Modern Critical Interpretations Series, ed. Harold Bloom, Chelsea House 2003
  • "Wars of Memory in Henry V," in Shakespeare Quarterly 47 (1996), 132-59
  • "The Reader on Trial: Or, Is Reading Necessarily an Injudicious Act?" in Critical Essays on Franz Kafka, ed. Ruth V. Gross, G.K. Hall 1990

Recent conferences

  • "Recovering Medieval Memory in Pericles," The 3rd International Congress of the John Gower Society, "John Gower: Language, Cognition, and Performance," July 2014 (Invited paper).  Other versions of this paper were delivered at the meetings of the Renaissance Society of America, Berlin, March, 2015, panel on Renaissance Studies of Memory organized by Rory Vincent Loughnane (Invited paper); and the Shakespeare Association of America, Vancouver, April 2015.
  • "Economic Nationalism in William Haughton's Englishmen for My Money and Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice," The Shakespeare Institute, Thirty-Sixth International Shakespeare Conference, Stratford-upon-Avon, August 2014 (Invited paper)
  • "Shylock Near and Far:  Close and Distant Reading in The Merchant of Venice," the Shakespeare Association of America, St Louis (April, 2014)
  • "Stages of Forgetfulness in Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy," First Annual Medieval and Renaissance Studies Seminar, The University of Missouri-Columbia, November 9, 2013 (Invited paper)
  • "Overlooking Forgetting:  Acts of Oblivion in the Second Tetralogy," Shakespeare Association of America, Toronto, March 30, 2013
  • "Working with Shakespeare," invited participant, Thirty-Fifth International Shakespeare Conference, Stratford-upon-Avon, 6-10 August 2012
  • "Shakespeare et la mémoire," invited talk, Congrès 2012 de la Société Française Shakespeare, Paris, 22-24 March 2012
  • "'This Distracted Globe': Theater and Globalization as Forms of Distraction in Early Modern England," invited participant, Richard Wilson’s Seminar on "Shakespeare and Globalization," World Shakespeare Congress, Prague, July 2011
  • "There’s Something About 'Merry':  or, What 'Merry' Meant in Early Modern England," invited participant, James Bulman's seminar on 2 Henry IV, Shakespeare Association of America, Bellevue, WA, April 2011
  • "Birth of a Nation out of the Spirit of Tragedy: Shakespeare's Richard II," invited speaker, International Conference on "Forgetting Faith?: Negotiating Confessional Conflict in Early Modern Europe," Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, 15-17 July 2010
  • "Shakespeare's Historical Sublime?: The Politics of Forgetting in Richard II," Shakespeare Association of America, Chicago, April 2010

Teaching

  • Modern American Poetry (fall 2015)
  • James Joyce (spring 2015)
  • The Films of Alfred Hitchcock (spring 2015)
  • The English Romantic Movement (fall 2014)
  • Lyric Poetry (spring 2014)
  • The Jacobean Shakespeare (spring 2014)
  • The Elizabethan Shakespeare (fall 2013)
  • The Short Story (spring 2013)
  • Contemporary American Poetry (spring 2013)
  • Film Noir (spring 2012)
  • Faulkner and His Heirs (spring 2012)
  • Dickinson and Frost (fall 2011)
  • Kafka and His Heirs (spring 2007)

Honors

  • Eisenhart Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2014
  • Four-time winner, open submissions competition, Shakespeare Association of America and the International Shakespeare Association
  • Senior Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies, 2000-01
  • Edward Peck Curtis Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, 2011
  • University of Rochester’s nominee for the Robert Cherry Foster Award for Great Teaching (a national competition), 2012