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. Dedicated to crossdisciplinary research creation, she is founding Director of the Renaissance of the Earth Project. A series of research collaborations, courses, integrative learning workshops, conferences, keynotes, and public-facing arts programming, the Renaissance of the Earth Project explores how early modern habits of thought and practice might aid in imagining alternative forms of habitation and cultivation of the earth and, in turn, how our current climate crisis and the social justice issues that arise in its wake demand a longer view of both human and environmental history. Her current book project, A World of Words: Language, Earth, and Embodiment in Early Modernity, investigates how lexicographers, language instructors, antiquarians, chorographers, horticulturists, as well as dramatists and poets, variously conceived of the relationships between language, earthly matter, and human embodiment, ultimately developing a mode of thinking that she characterizes as early modern "geo-linguistics." She is co-editor of Logomotives: Words that Change the World, 1400 -1700 (Edinburgh University Press, 2025) and co-curator, with Joe Black, on the campuswide Shakespeare Unbound Exhibit 2023-2024.