Adam Zucker
Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies
Faculty Bio
Adam Zucker has been a member of the UMass English Department since 2004. His area of expertise is 16th- and 17th-Century English literature, with a special focus on the plays of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and their contemporaries. He received his BA from Brown University and his MA, MPhil, and PhD from Columbia University.
Professor Zucker is the author of Shakespeare Unlearned: Pedantry, Nonsense, and the Philology of Stupidity (Oxford University Press, 2024) and The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and the co-editor of two books: Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater (Routledge, 2015), with Ronda Arab and Michelle Dowd; and Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, 1625-1642 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), with Alan B. Farmer. He is working on a new edition of Love’s Labor’s Lost for the fourth series of the Arden Shakespeare, and is a co-editor of the journal English Literary Renaissance.
Courses Recently Taught
Recent courses taught include the department’s Shakespeare lecture, a Junior-Year Writing course on Renaissance Fictions and Contemporary Fantasy, an undergraduate research seminar on Shakespeare and the senses, a survey of English literature from Beowulf to Paradise Lost, and graduate seminars on Early Modern Drama and Sound Studies, and Tudor and Stuart Poetry. Professor Zucker received the College of Humanities and Fine Arts Outstanding Teacher Award in 2012-13, and his book, The Places of Wit, was shortlisted for the 2012 Globe Theatre Book Award.
Recent Publications
“Postscript: The Open Street.” In The London Journal 47, 1 (2022), 127-33. Special issue on “London as Theatrical Space”, Tracey Hill and Andrew Gordon, eds.
“Pedantic Ben Jonson” in Martin Butler and Jane Rickard, eds. Ben Jonson and Posterity: Reception, Reputation, Legacy (Cambridge UP, 2020), 44-62.
“Vexed and Insatiable: Unfeelable Feelings and the Marketplace of Early Modern Drama,” in Rebecca Tomlin and Subha Mukherji, eds. Change and Exchange: Literature and Economics in Early Modern England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 91-111.