English Department Faculty

John Yargo (PhD, University of Massachusetts Amherst) is an Assistant Professor of English. His research areas include early modern literature including Shakespeare, critical race studies, and the environmental humanities. Selected as a 2022 Next Generation Plenary speaker by the Shakespeare Association of America, he is currently at work on a book project based on his dissertation, tentatively titled Environmental Catastrophe and the Early Modern Reinvention of Race. This project examines the period’s array of narrative and ideological approaches to narrating storms, wildfires, and earthquakes, against a growing sense of futility over the very possibility of making meaning from these catastrophes. In his public-facing work, he was invited as a guest on the High Theory podcast, serves as a regular host on the New Books in Literary Studies network, and co-organized “Eco-Entanglements, c. 920-2020: Ruin, Grafting, Stratification” a 2020 conference held at the Arthur Kinney Center for Renaissance Studies.