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Jennifer Rust, Ph.D.

Associate Professor; Associate Chair
English

Education

Ph.D. in English, University of California, Irvine, 2007
M.A. in Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine, 2002
M.A. in English Literature, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1999
B.A. in English, Northwestern University, 1994

Research Interests

Early modern English literature, Shakespeare, Spenser, Renaissance prose fiction, Catholic writing in the English Reformation, political theology, religious studies, critical theory, gender and sovereignty.

Publications and Media Placements

Books

The Body in Mystery: the Political Theology of the Corpus Mysticum in the Literature of Reformation England. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014.

Articles

"'Of Government the Properties to Unfold': Governmentalities in Measure for Measure," Sacred and Secular Transactions in the Age of Shakespeare, Ed. Katherine Steele Brokaw and Jay Zysk. Northwestern University Press., 2019: 93-117.
“Religious and Political Impasses in Measure for Measure,” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion. Ed. Hannibal Hamlin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019: 184-199.

“Forms of Governmentality in The Alchemist.” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 58.1 (Winter 2018): 95-121.

"Reforming the Mystical Body: From Mass to Martyr in John Foxe's Actes and Monuments," ELH 80.3 (2013): 627-659.

"Political Theologies of the Corpus Mysticum: Schmitt, Kantorowicz and de Lubac," Political Theology and Early Modernity, ed. Graham Hamill and Julia Reinhard Lupton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 147-176.

"Malengin and Mercilla, Southwell and Spenser: the Poetics of Tears and the Politics of Martyrdom in The Faerie Queene, Book Five, Canto Nine." Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism. Ed. Lowell Gallagher. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Forthcoming 2012.

"Political Theology and Shakespeare Studies." Literature Compass 5 (2008). Blackwell Publishing. 

"'Image of Idolatryes': Iconotropy and the Theo-Political Body in the Faerie Queene." Religion and Literature 38.3 (Autumn 2006): 137-155.

"Wittenberg and Melancholic Allegory: The Reformation and Its Discontents in Hamlet." Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England. Ed. Dennis Miller and David Beauregard. New York: Fordham University Press, 2003. 260-286.

Translation

Carl Schmitt. Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of the Time into the Play. Translation of Hamlet oder Hekuba: Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel (1956) by Jennifer R. Rust and David Pan, with introductory essays by David Pan, Jennifer R. Rust and Julia R. Lupton. New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2009.

Commentary

"The Stripping of the Altars" (Response to Dotan Leshem, The Origins of Neoliberalism: Modeling the Economy From Jesus to Foucault [New York: Columbia University Press, 2016]). Eugene, OR: Syndicate Theology, Wipf and Stock Publishers. February 2017.

"Political Theology: Sacred Flesh and Social Form.” Response to The Royal Remains: the People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty by Eric L. Santner (University of Chicago Press, 2011). Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 12.1 (Spring 2012)