Brian Lockey

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Professor
English
St. John's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Ph.D., October 1999, Rutgers University, English Literature, Specialty in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, Shakespeare, and critical theory.M.A., January 1993, University of Sussex. Brighton. U.K., with Distinction in Critical Theory of English Literature.B.A., June 1991, Swarthmore College. Swarthmore, PA., with Honors in English Literature.

Brian Lockey teaches Early Modern literature and culture, including Shakespeare. His most recent book, Early Modern Catholics, Royalists, and Cosmopolitans: English Transnationalism and the Christian Commonwealth (Ashgate 2015), looks at how the perspective of 16th-century English Catholic exiles and 17th-century English royalist exiles helped to generate a form of cosmopolitanism that was rooted in, but also transcended, contemporary religious and national identities. In the book, which is published as part of Ashgate’s Transculturalisms 1400-1700 series, Lockey considers the experiences of English exiles and the influence that they had on writers such as Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Anthony Munday, Sir John Harrington, Sir Richard Fanshawe, John Milton, and Aphra Behn. In addition, Lockey is the author of Law and Empire in English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge UP, 2006, Paperback edition 2009), which suggests that early modern fiction played a significant role in the discursive formation of legal imperialism. He has co-edited a special issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, entitled The Spanish Connection: Historical and Literary Perspectives on the Empires, he contributed a chapter on Shakespeare and Empire to the Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare, ed. A. Kinney (Oxford UP, 2011), and he has a chapter on Colonialism and the New World in the forthcoming volume, Edmund Spenser in Context, ed. A. Escobedo (Cambridge UP, 2016). His articles have appeared in English Literary Renaissance, the Journal of the History of Ideas, the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and in the volume, Representing Imperial Rivalry in the Early Modern Mediterranean, eds. B. Fuchs, E. Weissbourd (Toronto, 2015).

“Renegade, Traitor, Cosmopolite: Thomas Stukeley’s Continental Adventures.” Seminar: “Beyond the Metropolis: Regional and Continental Contexts for English Theater.” Shakespeare Association of America. San Diego, CA. April 5-7, 2007.

“The Catastrophic Translation of the Portuguese Empire: George Peele and Anthony Munday Abroad.” Renaissance Society of America. Miami, FL. March 24, 2007.

“Royalist Turned Cosmopolitan: Aphra Behn’s Post-Imperial Reading of Thomas Killigrew.” Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies. Chicago, IL. Feb. 22-25, 2007.

“English Law and Romance.” Seventeenth-Century Literature Association. Modern Language Association Convention. Washington, DC. December 2005.

Books:

Early Modern Catholics, Royalists, and Cosmopolitans: English Transnationalism and the Christian Commonwealth. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015. 388 pages.

Law and Empire in English Renaissance Literature. London, New York: Cambridge UP, 2006. Paperback edition: 2009. 248 pages.

Edited Collections:

Guest co-editor (with Barbara Fuchs, Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California, Los Angeles). Issue entitled, “Anglo-Spanish Relations: Historical and Literary Perspectives on the Empires.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10.1 (Spring/Summer 2010). 176 pages.

Articles:

“Colonialism and the New World.” Edmund Spenser in Context. Ed. Andrew Escobedo. New York: Cambridge University, Forthcoming. 4,500 words.

“Catholics and Cosmopolitans Writing the Nation: The Pope’s Scholars and the 1579 Student Rebellion at the English Roman College.” Collected in Barbara Fuchs and Emily Weissbourd (eds). Representing Imperial Rivalry in the Early Modern Mediterranean (U of Toronto P: 2015). 252-73.

“Empire.” The Oxford Handbook to Shakespeare. Ed. Arthur Kinney. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. 604-622.

“’Equitie to measure’: The Perils of Imperial Imitation in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie

Queene” Special Issue on Anglo-Spanish Relations. Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10.1 (Spring/Summer 2010): 52-70.

“Elizabethan Cosmopolitan: Captain Thomas Stukeley in the Court of Dom Sebastian.” English

Literary Renaissance 40.1 (Winter 2010): 1-32.

“Roman Conquest and English Legal Identity in Cymbeline.” Shakespearean Criticism.Vol.

120. Ed. Michelle Lee. Farmington, MI: Gale Cengage, 2009. (Reprint of chapter six from Law and Empire in English Renaissance Literature, pp. 160-86).

“‘A Language All Nations Understand’: Portraiture and the Politics of Anglo-Spanish Identity in

Aphra Behn’s The Rover.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 39:1 (Winter 2009): 161-182.

“Conquest and English Legal Identity in Renaissance Ireland.” Journal of the History of Ideas 65.4 (Oct 2004): 543-558.

“Roman Conquest and English Legal Identity in Cymbeline.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural

Studies 3.1 (Spring 2003): 113-47.

“Spenser's Legalization of the Irish Conquest in A View and The Faerie Queene VI.” English

Literary Renaissance 31.3 (Fall 2001): 365-391.

Reviews:

“Review: Eric Griffin, English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain.” Shakespeare

Quarterly 63.1 (Spring 2012): 144-47.

“Review: Bradin Cormack, Power to do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law, 1509-1625 (University of Chicago Press, 2008).” Renaissance Quarterly

62 (Spring 2009): 333-35.

“Review:  Joan Pong Linton, The Romance of the New World (Cambridge UP, 1998); Helen

Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge UP, 2000).” Kritikon Litterarum 30 (2003): 66-69.

“Review: Jon Quitslund, Spenser’s Supreme Fiction: Platonic Natural Philosophy and The Faerie Queene (Toronto UP 2001).” Kritikon Litterarum 29 (2002): 155-57.

Teaching Interests

  • Poetry, prose, and drama of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries
  • Shakespeare
  • Spenser
  • Milton
  • Epic and romance
  • Transatlantic English literatures
  • The Irish conquest and colonization
  • Law, religion, nationalism; Colonialism and imperialism
  • Formations of racial and gender identity
  • Critical theory and literary criticism

Courses Taught at St. John's University

  • English 3130 Shakespeare’s Elizabethan Plays
  • English 290 Graduate Seminar: New World Encounters and Conquests in British Literature
  • English 3140: Shakespeare’s Jacobean Plays
  • English 4991: Seminar in British Literature