About
Bradley Irish studies the literature and culture of 16th-century England, with a particular focus on the history of emotion. His first book, “Emotion in the Tudor Court: Literature, History, and Early Modern Feeling
,” draws on literary analysis, archival research, and cross-disciplinary scholarship in the sciences and humanities to interrogate the socioliterary operation of emotion in the Tudor courtly sphere. His second book, “Shakespeare and Disgust: The History and Science of Early Modern Revulsion” will be published in March 2023.
His research interests include: Tudor political and cultural history; emotions in early modern culture; Henrician literature and culture; Renaissance poetry, especially Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, and Spenser; the Elizabethan courtier poets; Renaissance drama, including Shakespeare; the revenge tragedy tradition; the stoic tradition in Renaissance literature; early modern manuscript culture; paleography and archival research.
He is also the creator of Sources of Early Modern Emotion in English, 1500-1700 (
http://www.earlymodernemotion.net), a collaborative project that documents primary and secondary sources related to the study of emotion in the early modern period.
Publications
Books:
Shakespeare and Disgust: The History and Science of Early Modern Revulsion. London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2023. [Forthcoming]
Edited Collections:
The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion, ed. Patrick Colm Hogan, Bradley J. Irish, and Lalita Pandit Hogan. New York: Routledge, 2022.
Positive Emotions in Early Modern Literature and Culture, ed. Cora Fox, Bradley J. Irish, and Cassie M. Miura. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021.
Articles/Chapters:
“Envy, Leanness, and
Julius Caesar.” Early Theatre, 2023. [Forthcoming]
“Envy, Beelzebub, and
Paradise Lost.” Huntington Library Quarterly, 2023. [Forthcoming]
“Envy, Jealousy, and Emulation: The Poetics of Affective Rivalry in ‘The Shepheardes Calender.'”
SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 2023. [Forthcoming]
“Racial Disgust in Early Modern England: The Case of
Othello.” Shakespeare Quarterly, Fall 2022. [Forthcoming]
“Social Reception.” In
The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion. Ed. Patrick Colm Hogan, Bradley J. Irish, and Lalita Pandit Hogan. New York: Routledge, 2022. 317-327.
“Literary Feelings: Understanding Emotions” (with Patrick Colm Hogan). In
The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion. Ed. Patrick Colm Hogan, Bradley J. Irish, and Lalita Pandit Hogan. New York: Routledge, 2022. 1-11.
“Solidarity as Ritual in the Late Elizabethan Court.” In
Positive Emotions in Early Modern Literature and Culture. Ed. Cora Fox, Bradley J. Irish
. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021. 121-135.
“Introduction” (with Cora Fox and Cassie Miura). In Positive Emotions in Early Modern Literature and Culture. Ed. Cora Fox, Bradley J. Irish, and Cassie Miura. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021. 1-17.
“Envy in Early Modern England.”
ELH 88.4 (2021): 845-878.
“A Strategic Compromise: Universality, Interdisciplinarity, and the Case for Modal Emotions in History of Emotion Research.”
Emotions: History, Culture, Society 4.2 (2020): 231-251.
“The Varieties of Early Modern Envy and Jealousy: The Case of Obtrectation.”
Modern Philology 117.1 (2019): 115-126.
“’Something After’? Hamlet and Dread.” In Hamlet and Emotions. Ed. Paul Megna, Bríd Phillips, and R.S. White. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 229-249.
“Fulke Greville the Courtier: Courting the Ghosts of Sidney and Essex.” In
The Measure of the Mind: Fulke Greville and the Culture of the English Renaissance. Ed. Russell J. Leo, Katrin Röder, and Freya Sierhuis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 210-226.
“Historicism and Universals.” The Literary Universals Project. Ed. Patrick Colm Hogan. 2018. Online:
https://literary-universals.uconn.edu/2016/09/20/literary-universals-and-historicism/
“Coriolanus and the Poetics of Disgust.”
Shakespeare Survey 69 (2016): 198-215.
“Friendship and Frustration: Counter-Affect in the Letters of Philip Sidney and Hubert Languet.”
Texas Studies in Literature and Language 57 (2015): 412-32.
“The Sidneys and Foreign Affairs, 1575-1578: An Unpublished Letter of Sir Henry Sidney.”
English Literary Renaissance 45 (2015): 90-119.
“The Literary Afterlife of the Essex Circle: Fulke Greville, Tacitus, and BL Additional MS 18638.”
Modern Philology 112 (2014): 271-285.
“The Rivalrous Emotions in Surrey’s ‘So Crewell Prison.’”
SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 53 (2014): 1-24.
“Writing Woodstock: The Prehistory of Richard II and Shakespeare’s Dramatic Method.”
Renaissance Drama 41 (2013): 131-149.
“‘Not cardinal but king’: Thomas Wolsey and the Henrician Diplomatic Imagination.” In
Authority and Diplomacy from Dante to Shakespeare. Ed. William T. Rossiter and Jason Powell. Burlington, VT: Ashgate: 2013. 85-99.
“Libels and the Essex Rising.”
Notes and Queries 59.1 (2012): 87-89.
“Gender and Politics in the Henrician Court: The Douglas-Howard Lyrics in the Devonshire Manuscript (BL Add 17492).”
Renaissance Quarterly 64.1 (2011): 79-114.
“Henry Howard, earl of Surrey.” In
The Blackwell Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature. Ed. Garrett Sullivan and Alan Stewart. 3 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 2011. 2.511-516.
“Vengeance, Variously: Revenge Before Kyd in Early English Drama.”
Early Theatre 12.2 (2009): 117-134.
“The Secret Chamber and Other Suspect Places: Materiality, Space, and the Fall of Catherine Howard.”
Early Modern Women 4 (2009): 169-175.
