Joseph Campana is a poet, arts writer, and scholar of Renaissance literature. He is the author of The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability and the Ethics of Masculinity (Fordham UP,2012), the co-editor of Renaissance Posthumanism (Fordham UP, 2016), and the author of three collections of poetry. His poems appear in Slate, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Conjunctions, Colorado Review, and many other venues. He has received the Isabell MacCaffrey Essay Prize, the MLA’s Crompton-Noll Award for LGB studies, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Houston Arts Alliance.
Campana serves as Editor, 1500-1659 of SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, for which he has edited a series of special issues: “Staging Allegory” (Spring 2015), “After Sovereignty” (Winter 2018), and “Shakespeare’s Waters” (Spring 2019), and “World, Globe, Planet” (Spring 2021). He serves as the Directory of the Center for Environmental Studies (ENST) and the co-director of the ENST minor.
Recently published essays treat a range of configurations of creaturely life in early modern England-busy bees, bleeding trees, and crocodile tears. Current projects include a study of children, futurity, and sovereignty in Shakespeare entitled The Child’s Two Bodies, a two volume edited collection on Renaissance insect life called Lesser Living Creatures, and a collection of poems entitled Live Oak.
(Spring 2023, Spring 2024)