Fellow of the Volkswagen Stiftung and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

August 2015 – June 2016

Rogue Sexuality: The Erotics of Social Status in Early Modern England

Ari Friedlander is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Mississippi. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Rogue Sexuality: The Erotics of Social Status in Early Modern England. The book argues for the centrality of sexual promiscuity to the social and literary concept of “roguery,” and traces how rogue sexuality disrupts conventional notions of early modern gender and social status. He is also co-editing a special issue of JEMCS: Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies entitled “Desiring History and Historicizing Desire,” which explores recent methodological debates in early modern sexuality studies about the relationship between historicism and queer theory. His second book project concerns the relationship between class, disability, labor, and the poor laws in early modern England. His work has appeared or is forthcoming from SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, A Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, Race (Oxford UP, 2016), JEMCS, and Upstart: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies. He has taught graduate and undergraduate courses on Shakespeare and Renaissance literature and culture, as well as theories and histories of gender, sexuality, and disability. Ari will hold a Mellon-Volkswagen Fellowship at the Dahlem Humanities Center from August 2015 - June 2016.