JOSEPH MANSKY
Assistant Professor of English | University of Oklahoma
About
Joseph Mansky is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, specializing in early modern literature. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. Before coming to OU, he taught at UC Berkeley, the City College of New York (CUNY), and Bard College. His research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Renaissance Society of America, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington Library, and the VPRP and Arts & Humanities Forum at OU.
Books
Libels and Theater in Shakespeare’s England: Publics, Politics, Performance
Libels and Theater in Shakespeare England (Cambridge, 2023) tracks libels through and around the early modern theater, tracing the contours of a viral and often virulent media ecosystem. In the 1590s, a series of crises—simmering xenophobia, years of dearth and hunger, surges of religious persecution, the fall of the Earl of Essex—sparked an unprecedented explosion of libeling. The same years also saw the first appearances of libels on the London stage. Defamatory, seditious texts are launched into the sky, cast in a window, affixed to a statue, recited in court, read from a pulpit, and seized by informers. Libels were avatars of sedition, yet they also carved out spaces for ordinary people to pass judgment on the most controversial issues and persons of the day. They were marked by mobility: they swirled across the early modern media and across class, confessional, and geographical lines. Ranging from Shakespearean drama to provincial pageantry, this book charts a public sphere poised between debate and defamation, between free speech and false news.
Reviews
- “Defamatory petitions: When libel was sedition,” Times Literary Supplement (Feb. 23, 2024)
- Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 57, no. 1 (Spring 2024)
- Early Theatre, vol. 28, no. 1 (June 2025)
- Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 78, no. 3 (Fall 2025)
- Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 56, no. 3 (Fall 2025)
Media
- Interview and excerpt, The Collation, Folger Shakespeare Library
- “The Paradox of Libel: From Shakespeare’s Age to Ours,” Fifteen Eighty Four blog, Cambridge University Press
- Interview, New Books & Projects, OUAH.FM Podcast
Political Representation: A Literary History, 1580-1651 (in progress)
This book will chart a new genealogy of political representation from Elizabethan humanism to the English Revolution, recovering the concept’s oft-forgotten debt to the early modern literary imagination.
Articles and Chapter
“Shakespeare, Populism, and the Public Sphere,” in The Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Politics, ed. Chris Fitter (Routledge, 2026), 251–67.
“Alchemist, Scholar, Spy: The Career of Henry Wright,” Huntington Library Quarterly 86.3 (2023): 425–45.
“Rethinking Royalism in Herrick’s Hesperides,” Review of English Studies 73 (2022): 476–89.
“Edward Coke, William West, and the Law of Libel,” Journal of Legal History 42.3 (2021): 328–32.
“The Case of Eleazar Edgar: Leicester’s Commonwealth and the Book Trade in 1604,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 115.2 (2021): 233–41.
“‘Variety’ and Republican Violence in Sidney’s Arcadia,” ELH 86.3 (2019): 587–612.
“‘Look no more’: Jonson’s Catiline and the Politics of Enargeia,” PMLA 134.2 (2019): 332–50.
“Jane Shore, Edward IV, and the Politics of Publicity,” Renaissance Drama 46.2 (2018): 141–65.
“‘Unlawfully published’: Libels and the Public Sphere in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 67.3 (2016): 293–318.
“Does Relation Stand? Textual and Social Relations in Paradise Regain’d,” Milton Studies 56 (2015): 45–72.
Contact
Email: jmansky@ou.edu
Profile: https://www.ou.edu/cas/english/people/joseph-mansky
Joseph Mansky 