Associate
Professor
English
St John Hall, Room B40-9
Queens campus
Phone: (718) 990-6690
Fax: (718) 990-2525
mentzs@stjohns.edu
Educational
Background
AB, 1989, Princeton University, English
MA, Mphil, 1998, Yale University, English
PhD, 2000, Yale University, English
Areas of
Specialization
English Renaissance Literature, Maritime Literature, Environmental
Approaches to Literature, History of the Book and Print Culture
Steve Mentz teaches early modern and Renaissance literature,
with recent courses on the Poetics of the Early Modern Globe;
Shakespeare, Education, and Power; and Urban Culture from
Elizabethan London to twenty-first-century New York. His
latest scholarly passion is maritime culture, which has generated a
new book, At the Bottom of Shakespeare's Ocean (2009), and
an upcoming public gallery exhibition, "Lost at Sea: The Ocean in
the Early Modern Imagination, 1550 - 1750," at the Folger
Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, in the summer of 2010.
He is also the author of Romance for Sale in Early Modern
England: The Rise of Prose Fiction (2006), Rogues and
Early Modern English Culture (2004), and numerous articles on
Shakespeare, ecological criticism, maritime culture, and related
topics. He regularly reviews plays for Shakespeare Bulletin,
and his Shakespeare classes see at least one new performance each
semester.
Before arriving at St. John’s, Dr. Mentz taught for three years
in the English Department at Iona College in New Rochelle,
NY. His Bachelors’ degree is from Princeton University (summa
cum laude), where his senior thesis won the Francis LeMoyne Page
Prize in Creative Writing. His PhD is from Yale University,
where he received several prize fellowships and grants.
Most recently, Dr. Mentz was the R. David Parsons Fellow at the
John Carter Brown Library at Brown University during the academic
year 2008-2009. His research in maritime literature and
culture has also received fellowship support from the National
Endowment of the Humanities, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and
the National Maritime Museum in London. He has received three
St. John's University Summer Fellowships (2008, 2006, and 2004),
and has twice participated in Research Seminars at the Folger
Shakespeare Library.
Dr. Mentz’s first book, Rogues and Early Modern English
Culture (Michigan, 2004; paperback 2006) is a collection of
essays about criminality and urban culture in England. The
book explores the longstanding fascination criminals and their
stories have in our culture; a review in London’s Times Literary
Supplement claims that it “makes a fine case for the centrality of
the rogue and rogue writing to any understanding of the early
modern city and its culture.” His second book, Romance
for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction
(Ashgate, 2006), investigates the then-new practice in Elizabethan
London of printing prose narratives to sell them at city
bookshops. This project contributes to the scholarly subfield
known as “the history of the book,” which considers not just print
culture in early modern Europe but also communications technologies
from the pen to the internet.
His current project, “Shipwreck and the Meanings of Ocean,
1552-1719,” explores shipwreck narratives from Shakespeare’s
The Tempest to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.
With this project Dr. Mentz joins other scholars interested in
“ecocriticism” and “historicizing the oceans” in exploring
humankind’s relationship to the oceans and the natural world, and
also how these symbolic relationships speak to our twenty-first
century ecological crisis.
He was also a McNair Fellowship mentor during 2004-5.
For more information, see Dr. Mentz's website, www.shakespearecommons.com.