Michael Komorowski Box 208302, New Haven, CT 06520 michael.komorowski@yale.edu October 2014 Employment Lecturer, Columbia University, Department of English and Comparative Literature, September 2014- Lecturer, Queens College, CUNY, Department of English, June 2013-May 2014 Lecturer, Yale University, Department of English, January 2013- Education Ph.D., English and Renaissance Studies, Yale University, December 2012 B.A., English and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley, May 2006, highest honors in English, highest distinction in general scholarship Book project The Arts of Interest: Property and the English Literary Imagination in the Age of Milton This study shows how John Milton, Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, and others represent the inherent duality of interest, a central concept for understanding motivation in the early modern period, as both rational and emotional. These writers shaped the concept as a powerful cultural fiction, but by doing so they highlighted the distance between artistic achievements and political or economic pursuits. By the end of the seventeenth century, when an emerging public sphere facilitated the consumption of political and economic news, interests seemed to pertain more clearly to those fields. In response, imaginative writers and critics began to value literature not for its examination of interests, but for the uniquely disinterested pleasure it provided. Publications Director s Cut, in The Pocket Instructor: Literature, ed. Diana Fuss and William Gleason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2015) [1000-word classroom exercise for teaching Shakespeare s history plays] On the New Forcers of Conscience and Milton s Erastianism, Milton Studies 55 (forthcoming 2014) Milton s Natural Law: Divorce and Individual Property, Milton Studies 53 (2012): 69-99
Komorowski 2 Public Verse and Property: Marvell s Horatian Ode and the Ownership of Politics, ELH 79 (2012): 315-40 The Diplomatic Genre before the Italian League: Civic Panegyrics of Bruni, Poggio, and Decembrio, in New Worlds and the Italian Renaissance: Contributions to the History of European Intellectual Culture, ed. Andrea Moudarres and Christiana Purdy Moudarres (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 47-73 Teaching Columbia University, 2014- English W3259, Milton Upper-division seminar on Milton s poetry and a selection of his controversial prose. This seminar studied the shape of Milton s career, his poetic development, influences, and historical and literary context. Queens College, CUNY, 2013-2014 English 720, Renaissance Passions: Violence, Sexuality, Urban Space Graduate seminar on a range of texts from Wyatt s lyrics to Behn s Oronooko, including two plays by Shakespeare, Cavendish s Blazing World, and Milton s Samson Agonistes. This class investigated how literary writers began to map human emotions in an effort to understand how the mind acted and was acted upon by the varied impulses they called the passions. English 251, British Literature Survey I (2 courses) Undergraduate survey from Beowulf to Paradise Lost that introduced literature in a variety of genres including epic, chivalric romance, fabliau, the sonnet sequence, lyric, and comedy. Emphasis on the formation of a literary tradition and how that tradition, in turn, encouraged writers to rethink faith-based and national identities, sexuality, gender relations, and the pleasures of the imagination. Yale University, 2009- English 115, Literature Seminar: Rebels and Literature Exploration of major themes in selected works of literature intended for freshmen and sophomores. Emphasis on the development of writing skills and the analysis of fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction prose. This seminar studied rebels and rebellion in works including Shakespeare s sonnets and Othello, Dickinson s poems, Flaubert s Madame Bovary, and Morrison s Beloved. English 114, Writing Seminars (11 seminars, 2009-14) Instruction in writing well-reasoned analyses and academic arguments, with emphasis on the importance of reading, research, and revision. Using examples of nonfiction prose from a variety of academic disciplines, students are given models of clear, argumentative writing to discuss in class and imitate in their essays. I have designed and taught seminars on the following subjects: the politics of globalization, democracy in the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, and the mythologies of California.
Komorowski 3 Teaching Fellow (weekly discussion section leader), Yale University English 200, Shakespeare: Comedies and Romances (Prof. Lawrence Manley), Spring 2010, Guest lecture: Pericles: Romance and the Redemption of Language English 220, Milton (Prof. John Rogers), Spring 2009, Guest lecture: Milton and Republicanism English 201, Shakespeare: Histories and Tragedies (Prof. David Scott Kastan), Fall 2008 Fellowships and awards Yale English Department prize for the best dissertation of the year, 2013 Yale English Department prize for the best essay accepted for publication (for Milton s Natural Law ), 2012 Whiting Dissertation Fellowship in the Humanities, 2010-11 Grant-in-aid, Researching the Archives: Dissertation Seminar, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, 2009-10 Elizabethan Club Prize for criticism on a Renaissance topic, 2009 Research Fellowship, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, 2009 Elizabethan Club Prize for criticism on a Renaissance topic (honorable mention), 2008 A. Bartlett Giamatti Fellowship, Department of English, Yale University, 2006-08 Graduate Fellowship, Yale University, 2006-10 Phi Beta Kappa, 2006 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (for research of senior thesis), College of Letters and Science, University of California, Berkeley, 2005 Presentations On the New Forcers of Conscience and Milton s Erastianism, Conference on John Milton, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN, 2013 Milton s Natural Law: Divorce and Individual Property, Medieval and Renaissance Colloquium, Yale University, 2012 Milton s Epistle to the Romans: Paradise Lost, the Natural Law, and Liberty of Conscience, The Bible in the Seventeenth Century: The Authorised Version Quatercentenary (1611-2011), University of York (UK), 2011 Public Verse and Property: Marvell s Horatian Ode and the Ownership of Politics, Andrew Marvell and the Sense of Place Conference, Princeton University, 2011
Komorowski 4 Style and the State: Aesthetics of an English Literary Baroque, The Baroque Page: Image and Text Symposium, Yale University, 2011 The Artificial Eternity of Interest: Hobbes, Harrington, and the Satire of the State, Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, Montreal, Canada, 2011 The Curious History of Interest: What Historicist Literary Criticism Can Do, Renaissance Studies Lunch Series, Yale University, 2010 The Interests of Conscience: Paradise Lost and the Restoration of Inner Liberty, Northeast Conference on British Studies, Burlington, VT, 2010 Movable Property and Panegyric under Cromwell: Marvell s and Waller s Poetics of the Emerging Modern State, Transitions to Modernity Annual Conference, Yale University, 2009 Private Property and the Nature of Marvell s Republicanism, Conference on Early Modern Literature, 1500-1800, Yale University, 2009 The Diplomatic Genre before the Italian League: Civic Panegyrics of Bruni, Poggio, and Decembrio, Foundations of Modernity: A Graduate Symposium on the Italian Renaissance, Yale University, 2009 The Frank Shepherd: Spenser, Marot, and Growing Old in Pastoral Winter, Yale-Princeton Workshop, Yale University, 2007 Academic service Mentor for graduate-student instructors of first-year writing, Yale University, 2013- Panel organizer and chair, Passions and Interests in Renaissance Rhetoric, Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, 2014 Panel chair, Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics Symposium, 2010 Planning Committee, New England Renaissance Conference, 2010 Graduate Student Advisory Committee, English Department, Yale University, 2009-10 Renaissance Studies Working Group, Yale University, coordinator and cofounder, 2009-11 British Studies Colloquium, Yale University, coordinator, 2008-10 Professional memberships Modern Language Association Renaissance Society of America
Komorowski 5 Teaching interests Milton, Shakespeare, poetry, literature and politics, history of emotions, gender and sexuality, aesthetics, early modern economic thought Languages French (fluent), Italian (reading), Latin (reading), Spanish (reading and speaking proficiency) References (dossier available upon request) Janice Carlisle, Professor of English, Yale University, janice.carlisle@yale.edu, 203 432 2259 Thomas Frosch, Professor Emeritus of English, Queens College, CUNY, thomas.frosch@qc.cuny.edu, 718 997 4652 David Scott Kastan, George M. Bodman Professor of English, Yale University, david.kastan@yale.edu, 203 432 2242 Lawrence Manley, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English, Yale University, lawrence.manley@yale.edu, 203 432 2249 David Quint, Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature and English, Yale University, david.quint@yale.edu, 203 432 2229 John Rogers, Professor of English, Yale University, john.rogers@yale.edu, 203 432 2264 Steven Zwicker, Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis, szwicker@artsci.wustl.edu, 314 935 4405