Marjorie Rubright

Marjorie Rubright joined the University of Massachusetts Amherst English faculty in 2017. Prior to her arrival, she was Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto. Her areas of research and teaching specialization include: early modern English literature and culture, early modern race and ethnicity studies, feminist criticism, renaissance lexical culture, and critical approaches to the study of the global renaissance.

Her current book project, A World of Words: Language, Earth and Embodiment in the Renaissance, traces the earthly substrates of renaissance lexical culture. In its broadest strokes, the book examines period-specific ways of thinking about human sameness and difference that emerge when one attends to how language and linguistic identity are imaginatively linked not only to ethnicized and racialized human bodies, but also to a diversity of earthly matter. In it, she investigates how lexicographers, language instructors, antiquarians, chorographers, horticulturists, as well as dramatists and poets, variously conceived of the relationships between language, earth, and embodiment, ultimately developing a mode of thinking that she characterizes as early modern "geo-linguistics."

Marjorie Rubright's complete bio can be found on the English Department website.