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About John Yargo

I am a Visiting Assistant Professor at Boston College. I earned my PhD in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. My specializations are early modern literature, the environmental humanities, and critical race studies. My dissertation explores early modern representations of environmental catastrophe, and my peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Shakespeare Studies.

More information at johnyargo.com

John Yargo is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Boston College. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His specializations are early modern literature, the environmental humanities, and critical race studies. His dissertation explores early modern representations of environmental catastrophe, including William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, and John Milton's Paradise Lost. He has published in Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Shakespeare Studies.

John's website

NBN Episodes hosted by John:

Literary Studies September 16, 2023

Emergency

Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis

Edgar Garcia

Hosted by John Yargo
Today’s guest is Edgar Garcia. Garcia’s new book Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Emergency takes nine words—“birds,” “wealth,” “caves,” “television,” …
Literary Studies September 12, 2023

But Have You Read the Book?

52 Literary Gems That Inspired Our Favorite Films

Kristen Lopez

Hosted by John Yargo
Listen:
Published earlier this year from Running Press, Kristen Lopez’s But Have You Read the Book?: 52 Literary Gems That Inspired Our Favorite Films looks at almost a hundred years of …
Literary Studies September 6, 2023

Matter and Making in Early English Poetry

Literary Production from Chaucer to Sidney

Taylor Cowdery

Hosted by John Yargo
Listen:
Is the raw material of literature the paper, ink, vellum, paphyrus, and increasingly electronic data that it is inscribed on? Or is the stuff of literature the storehouse of tropes …
Literary Studies September 1, 2023

Character as Form

Aaron Kunin

Hosted by John Yargo
Listen:
Today’s guest is Aaron Kunin, Professor of English at Pomona College. We will discuss two books Aaron published in 2019: the first is Character as Form (Bloomsbury), a re-examination of …
Literary Studies August 29, 2023

Book Madness

A Story of Book Collectors in America

Denise Gigante

Hosted by John Yargo
In February 1848, a book auction took place in Astor House, No. 7, on the corner of Broadway and Vesey in lower Manhattan, New York. By all accounts, the books …
Literary Studies August 27, 2023

Reanimating Shakespeare's Othello in Post-Racial America

Vanessa I. Corredera

Hosted by John Yargo
Vanessa I. Corredera’s book Reanimating Shakespeare's Othello in Post-Racial America (Edinburgh Univeristy Press, 2022) looks at how that seventeenth-century play and its protagonist was imagined in theatre, television, and other …
Literary Studies August 26, 2023

Forms of Contention

Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition

Hollis Robbins

Hosted by John Yargo
As I learned from Hollis Robbins’s monograph Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition (U Georgia Press, 2020), there has been a long-standing skepticism of the sonnet …
Literary Studies August 24, 2023

Noah's Arkive

Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates

Hosted by John Yargo
Listen:
At a moment when the world has tipped over into irreversible violence and corruption, a divinity contacts a righteous man. The man is directed to build a giant ship and …
Literary Studies August 17, 2023

The New Mutants

Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics

Ramzi Fawaz

Hosted by John Yargo
Listen:
Today’s guest is Ramzi Fawaz, the Romnes Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Published by NYU Press in 2016, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of …
Literary Studies July 22, 2023

Revolution of the Ordinary

Literary Studies After Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell

Toril Moi

Hosted by John Yargo
Today’s guest is Toril Moi, whose book Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies After Wittgenstein, Austin and Cavell (University of Chicago Press, 2017) returns to three twentieth-century figures in ordinary …
Literary Studies July 21, 2023

"Companionable Thinking: Spenser With..."

A Discussion with Namratha Rao, Joe Moshenska, and David Hillman

Namratha Rao, Joe Moshenska, and David Hillman

Hosted by John Yargo
Listen:
Volume 37 of Spenser Studies is a special issue on the theme of “Companionable Thinking: Spenser With.” As guest editors of this collection of essays, Namratha Rao (University of York) …
Literary Studies July 14, 2023

Modern Language, Philosophy and Criticism

Wayne Deakin

Hosted by John Yargo
Listen:
Today’s guest is Wayne Deakin, whose new book, Modern Language, Philosophy, and Criticism, has just published by Palgrave Macmillan in summer 2023. Modern Language, Philosophy, and Criticism surveys the varied …
Literary Studies July 11, 2023

Marvel Comics in The 1970s

The World Inside Your Head

Eliot Borenstein

Hosted by John Yargo
Listen:
I am excited to welcome Eliot Borenstein to the podcast today to discuss his new monograph, Marvel Comics in the 1970s: The World Inside Your Head, published through Cornell University …
Literary Studies July 9, 2023

The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought

Natural Philosophy and the Poetics of the Ineffable

Kevin Killeen

Hosted by John Yargo
Listen:
Today’s guest is Kevin Killeen whose new monograph, The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought: Natural Philosophy and the Poetics of the Ineffable, has just been published by Stanford University Press …
Literary Studies July 4, 2023

Blotted Lines

Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Discomposition

Adhaar Noor Desai

Hosted by John Yargo
Listen:
Almost every student that will enroll in a college Shakespeare course can expect two things. Students will have to engage with the style and themes of texts that were composed …
Literary Studies July 3, 2023

Domestic Georgic

Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton

Katie Kadue

Hosted by John Yargo
Listen:
Many early modern humanists would balk at the proposition that what they did amounted to housework. They were far more likely to reach for the heroic image of a farmer …
Literary Studies April 30, 2023

The Bard in the Borderlands

An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en la Frontera

Katherine Gillen, Adrianna M. Santos, and Kathryn Vomero Santos

Hosted by John Yargo
First performed in the Milagro Theater of Portland, Oregon in 2014, Olga Sanchez Saltveit’s ¡O Romeo! imagines William Shakespeare, late in his life, writing a play set in Mexico about …
Literary Studies March 19, 2023

Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms

Jessica Brantley

Hosted by John Yargo
Today’s guest is Jessica Brantley, Professor of English at Yale University. Professor Brantley is the author of the previous monograph, Reading in the Wilderness, published by the University of Chicago …
Literary Studies March 10, 2023

Botanical Poetics

Early Modern Plant Books and the Husbandry of Print

Jessica Rosenberg

Hosted by John Yargo
Today’s guest is Jessica Rosenberg, who is the author of a new book titled Botanical Poetics: Early Modern Plant Books and the Husbandry of Print (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022). An …
Literary Studies February 10, 2023

Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage

Jane Hwang Degenhardt

Hosted by John Yargo
How were understandings of chance, luck, and fortune affected by early capitalist developments such as the global expansion of English trade and colonial exploration? And how could the recognition that …
Literary Studies February 4, 2023

The Ruins Lesson

Meaning and Material in Western Culture

Susan Stewart

Hosted by John Yargo
How have ruins become so valued in Western culture and so central to our art and literature? Covering a vast chronological and geographical range, from ancient Egyptian inscriptions to twentieth-century …
Literary Studies November 28, 2022

Queer Velocities

Time, Sex, and Biopower on the Early Modern Stage

Jennifer Eun-Jung Row

Hosted by John Yargo
In a pathbreaking new book, today’s guest, Jennifer Eun-Jung Row, asks how delay and haste in early modern French theater subverts the temporality of heteronormative politics and sexuality. Professor Row …
Literary Studies November 4, 2022

The Curious Eye

Optics and Imaginative Literature in Seventeenth-Century England

Erin Webster

Hosted by John Yargo
Today’s guest, Erin Webster, is the author of The Curious Eye: Optics and Literature in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2020). A book that casts its attention on the …
Literary Studies October 28, 2022

Vital Strife

Sleep, Insomnia, and the Early Modern Ethics of Care

Benjamin Parris

Hosted by John Yargo
In an exciting new book titled Vital Strife: Sleep, Insomnia, and the Early Modern Ethics of Care (Cornell UP, 2022), Benjamin Parris shows how early modern writing about care and …