Department of English

Nichole E. Miller

nmiller@temple.edu

Nichole E. Miller joined Temple's English department in 2008. She completed her Ph.D. (2008) and M.A. (2004) in English literature, with a graduate emphasis in critical theory, at the University of California, Irvine, after obtaining an M.St. (2000) in Women's Studies at Oxford University. Her research and teaching interests include Shakespeare, 16th-17th C. British literature, political theologies and political philosophy, critical and literary theory, and gender studies. Her current book project, Violence and Grace: Exceptional Life between Shakespeare and Modernity, explores the interaction between Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and the political thinkers of the first part of the twentieth century. Each chapter stages a dialogue between an early modern play (by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Middleton) and a modern work of political philosophy (by Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Kantorowicz, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and Max Weber) that draws on early modern drama to ground its own critique of modern statecraft. The book's primary goal is not only to demonstrate the ways Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights negotiate the febrile political tensions of the period, but also to show how their works illuminate modern political phenomena, such as the secularized state of exception (the emergency suspension of law), originating in mediaeval and Renaissance political theology. The book analyzes how the early modern works emphasize the connection of domestic and state forms of violence, politics, and aesthetics, and the peculiar exigencies of grace impacting each of these categories. Ultimately, Violence and Grace makes a case for reading the modern political thinkers who appropriate and deploy such texts in their own works with a special eye to reasserting the relevance of sexuality and sexual difference to their accounts. She is also beginning research on a second book, tentatively entitled The Skull Beneath the Skin: The Jacobeans in Bloomsbury; visions of a third, Paulina's Case: Theorizing Shakespeare's Female Friends, occasionally intrude.

Publications

“Sacred Life and Sacrificial Economy:  Coriolanus in No-Man’s-Land.” Criticism 51.2 (Spring 2009): 263-310. Available online via Project Muse, or download pdf here.

“The Sexual Politics of Pain:  Hannah Arendt Meets Shakespeare’s Shrew.”  Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory 7.2 (2006): 18-32.  Available online at http://www.jcrt.org/archives.

Selected Conferences

• "Shakespeare and Political Theology." Shakespeare Association of American seminar, co-organized with Jennifer Rust of St. Louis University. Bellevue, WA, April 2011.
• "Distending the 'promised end': Messianic Time in Caravaggio and King Lear": Invited panel paper presented at the Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, Venice, Italy, April 2010.
• "Undead Letters: Tragedy and Historiography between Marlowe and Kantorowicz": Paper presented at Temple University's Premodern Colloquium, "On the Undeadness of the King's Two Bodies," September, 2009.
• "The revenger's decision: Reading Hamlet between Middleton and Schmitt":Seminar paper for "Hamlet and Political Theory," Shakespeare Association of America Annual Meeting, Washington, D. C., April 2009.
• "Translating Suffering in Sophocles' Philoctetes and the book of Job": Panel paper presented at the American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, March 2009.
• "The Revenger's Decision": Panel paper presented at the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA, November 2008.
• "The Given Name in Plutarch and Shakespeare": Panel paper presented at the American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, Long Beach, CA, April 2008
• "Sacred Life and Sacrificial Economy in Coriolanus": Seminar paper for "Shakespeare and Sacrifice," Shakespeare Association of American Annual Meeting, Dallas, TX, March 2008.
• "Coriolanus in No-Man's Land": Panel paper presented at the Renaissance Conference of Southern California, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, February 2008.
• "Relics and Returns: Tragedy and Historiography in Marlowe's Edward II": Seminar paper for "The Varied Politics of Early Modern Historiography," Shakespeare Association of America Annual Meeting, San Diego, CA, April 2007.

Courses Taught

• ENG2201, Survey of English Literature, Beginnings through 1660: "Gods, Monsters, and Makers" (Spring 2009; Fall 2010; Spring 2011)
• ENG229, Introduction to Shakespeare (Fall 2008, 2009, 2010)
• ENG3222, Advanced Shakespeare I: "Romans, Britons, Others: Gender and Nation in Shakespeare" (Spring 2009)
• ENG3222, Advanced Shakespeare II: "Shakespearean Misrule" (Spring 2010)
• ENG4597, Studies in Renaissance Literature: "Living outside the law: Dramas of revenge" (Spring 2009)
• ENG5014, Graduate Studies in Renaissance Literature: "Political Life and Its Exceptions in Shakespeare" (Fall 2009)