English Department Faculty

John Yargo’s teaching and research interests include early modern literature, especially Shakespeare and Milton; the environmental humanities; and premodern critical race theory. He was awarded the 2023 J. Leeds Barroll Dissertation Prize by the Shakespeare Association of America. His work has been published or is forthcoming in PMLA, Early Theatre, the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, Shakespeare Studies, and the Oxford Handbook of Christopher Marlowe. In his public-facing work, Yargo was a guest on the High Theory podcast  and is a regular host on the New Books in Literary Studies network. He is the Book Reviews Editor at Shakespeare Studies.

Yargo is currently at work on his first book, tentatively titled Saturnine Ecologies: Environmental Catastrophe in Early Modern England. Saturnine Ecologies argues that many of the early modern representations of extreme weather we consider aesthetic triumphs—King Lear’s storm, Oroonoko’s wildfires, Paradise Lost’s floods—disrupt the close alignment of environmental catastrophe with literary form. These texts innovate in the use of plot, litany, and metaphor, but they also register how the imposition of literary form necessarily distorts the lived experience of environmental destruction.