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David Scott Kastan

George M. Bodman Professor of English, Yale University

Although I teach broadly across the field of Renaissance literature, my primary intellectual concern is with the relations of culture and history in early modern England, considered from a variety of perspectives.

Increasingly this interest has focused on the production, transmission, and reception of texts (a focus that I like to think of as “the new boredom”). I am one of the general editors of the Arden Shakespeare, for which I edited "Henry IV, Part One," and I have edited Milton’s "Paradise Lost" and Marlowe’s "Doctor Faustus" (A and B text) for other publishers.

I co-edited the Bantam Shakespeare, and was the series editor for the Barnes and Noble Shakespeare. Among my scholarly publications are "Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time," Shakespeare after Theory," "Shakespeare and the Book," and "A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion."

A new book, entitled "On Color," written with the painter Stephen Farthing, will be published by Yale University Press later this spring, and I am now working on a history of the book in 15 micro-histories, to be called "Book Cases" and published by Princeton University Press.

Experience

  • 2008–present
    George M. Bodman Professor of English, Yale University
  • 1987–2008
    Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University
  • 1974–1987
    Professor of English, Dartmouth College

Education

  • 1974 
    University of Chicago, PhD
  • 1967 
    Princeton University, BA

Publications

  • 2018
    On Color, Yale University Press
  • 2014
    A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion, Oxford University Press
  • 2006
    Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, Oxford University Press
  • 2001
    Shakespeare and the Book, Cambridge University Press

Grants and Contracts

  • 2004
    Guggenheim Fellowship
    Role:
    Funding Source:
    John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship