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Johnson publishes article on English Renaissance drama and superstition

Posted August 04, 2016   Print
Jared Johnson story

GREENVILLE, Pa.-- Associate Professor of English and Department Chair Jared Johnson, Ph.D., has published an article in the latest edition of the Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference.

Johnson’s essay, titled “‘Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible / To feeling as to sight?’: Spiritual Bondage, Carnal Corruption, and Horror in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare’s Macbeth,” explores stage representations of the supernatural in two famous English Renaissance dramas. Johnson contextualizes the plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare by drawing on early modern English and Scottish legal proceedings and contract law with particular attention to witchcraft testimony. He argues that playwrights and theater producers capitalized on local superstition to draw audiences to their shows in the same vein as modern horror film directors and producers.

Johnson holds a B.A. in English and philosophy from Flagler College in St. Augustine, Fla.; an M.A. in English from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; and a Ph.D. in English and cultural studies from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Prior to arriving at Thiel College, he was a study abroad assistant for the University of Georgia at Oxford Program in Oxford, England. He was also a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

Johnson has taught in the College’s Department of English since 2012. He received a Faculty Scholarship Award and a Greenville Neuromodulation Center Faculty/Student Research Institute grant in 2015, which enabled him to conduct research for the article at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. He is currently researching a project that examines concepts of evil in J.J. Abrams’ “Star Wars: Episode VII—The Force Awakens.”

Operating since 2007, the Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference is a peer-reviewed journal that annually publishes the best works delivered by scholars at the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference. The conference will celebrate its 40th year at the October 2016 gathering—titled “Encountering Shakespeare”—at Wright State University. Johnson’s article appears in Volume 7 of the journal.

About the GNC Faculty/Student Research Institute

In 2015, Thiel College alumni Fred Haer ’65 and his wife, Jill (Shackett) ’66, pledged more than $400,000 to fund the institute from 2015-2017. It is open to all Thiel College faculty members. In its second year, seven research projects are part of the institute.

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