Associate Professor
Educated at Brown University, B.A., 1994; Columbia University, M.A., 1997; Columbia University, Ph.D., 2004.
Areas of specialty: Early Modern literature.
Adam Zucker's teaching and research center around the drama and poetry of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, with special focus on the plays of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and their contemporaries. Other interests include: economic history; the social spaces of Tudor and Stuart London; histories of gender and sexuality; theories of taste and manners; the early modern exotic; and Restoration comedy. His current project is a study of stupidity in the plays of Shakespeare and in early modern English culture more generally. He is a member of the editorial board of English Literary Renaissance and co-director of the Five Colleges Renaissance Seminar.
Selected Publications:
The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, 1625-1642. Co-editor with Alan B. Farmer (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
"Late Shakespeare." In Arthur Kinney, ed. The Oxford Handbook to Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2012).
"The Social Stakes of Gambling in Early Modern London." In Amanda Bailey and Roze Hentschell, eds, Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, 1550-1650 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
"London and Urban Space." In Julie Sanders, ed. Ben Jonson in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Selected awards and fellowships:
Francis Bacon Fellowship. Huntington Library, Spring 2012.
Faculty Development Grant. University of Massachusetts, 2009.
Lilly Teaching Fellowship. University of Massachussets, 2007-2008.
Shorter online ephemera:
“Laughing at Shakespeare.” Posted at “This Side of The Pond,” Cambridge University Press Author Blog.
“Hyde Park.” Posted at “Politics, Literary Culture and Theatrical Media in London: 1625-1725.” Teaching Resource edited by Professor Malcolm Smuts.
Recent classes taught:
ENGL 198: Bad Shakespeare?
ENGL 201: Major British Writers I
ENGL 221: Shakespeare
ENGL 300: Early Modern Women Writers
ENGL 326: Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama
ENGL 491GG: The History of Comedy
ENGL 591: Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe: Political Theater in Early Modern England
ENGL 891EE: Theatrical Space and Social Relations in Early Modern England
