Bruce Smith studies the literature and culture of early modern England, including Shakespeare, gender, sexuality, acoustic ecology and historical phenomenology. Among his six published books, "The Acoustic World of Early Modern England” won the 2000 Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature, attracting the attention of theater professionals, communications specialists and musicologists. At USC College, Smith hopes to develop courses that interest English students, as well as students of music and drama. His current work explores what it was like to live in the kind of body imagined by early modern medicine and to perceive the world through that body. He is particulary interested in how important the senses and the passions were to perception before Descartes divorced the thinking mind from the sensing body in the middle of the 17th century.
Experience
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–presentDean's Professor of English and Professor of Theatre, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
