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James Kuzner, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and the Art of Love

James Kuzner is Associate Professor of English at Brown University. His talk is drawn from his current book project, "Shakespeare and the Art of Love." The book demonstrates how literature offers distinctive ways of learning to love. Kuzner has been thinking through parts of the book in a blog for Psychology Today and The Conversation.

James Kuzner's first book, Open Subjects: English Renaissance Republicans, Modern Selfhoods, and the Virtue of Vulnerability (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), traces a strand of early modern republicanism that can be used to develop conceptions of vulnerable, “open” selfhood outlined in contemporary radical theory. His second book is Shakespeare as a Way of Life: Skeptical Practice and the Politics of Weakness (Fordham University Press, 2016). He is now completing a third book, "Love's Metaphysics: Donne to Dickinson," a study of metaphysical poets and what their poetry can say about love that philosophy can't. Kuzner  has published articles on Shakespeare, Milton, and Donne in journals such as Shakespeare Quarterly, Criticism, English Literary History, Exemplaria, and Modern Language Quarterly. Before coming to Brown, Kuzner was Assistant Professor of English at Case Western Reserve University.

Co-sponsored by the UCI Shakespeare Center. Free and open to all. Lunch will be served.