Postdoctoral R & T Fellow
Contact Information
Email: jgriswol@gmu.edu
Phone: 703.993.1160
Mail Stop: Honors College, MSN 1F4
Campus: Fairfax
Office: Horizon Hall 4208
Biography
Jeffrey B. Griswold is a Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Fellow in the English Department at George Mason University. His teaching and research focus on the literature and political philosophy of the English Renaissance. His book project, entitled Human Insufficiency: Natural Slavery and the Racialization of Vulnerability in Early Modern England, seeks to understand why early modern writers frequently described the human as the weakest and most vulnerable of all animals. By tracing depictions of Man as the insufficient animal through early modern literature and political philosophy, this project recovers an ideological history of race and slavery grounded in a surprising object: the fragile human body. Broadly, his scholarship explores issues of race, political belonging, consent, embodiment, the human, and allegory.
Selected Publications
“Human Vulnerability and Natural Slavery in The Faerie Queene.” Exemplaria (forthcoming).
“Homo Homini Lupus: Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and the Vicissitudes of a Political Adage.” Studies in Philology (forthcoming).
“Macbeth’s Thick Night and the Political Ecology of a Dark Scotland.” Critical Survey 31.3 (Autumn 2019): 31-43.
Courses Taught
ENGH 324 - English Renaissance Drama
ENGH 308 - Theory and Inquiry: Fictions of the Human
ENGH 431 - Early Modern Literature and the Limits of the Human
ENGH 322 - Shakespeare
ENGH 202 - Texts and Contexts: Shakespeare
Education
PhD in English, University of Maryland, College Park