English Department Faculty
John Yargo
Visiting Assistant Professor
John Yargo
Ph.D.
Contact
Stokes Hall S481
Email: yargo@bc.edu
Education
- B.A., Millsaps College
- Ph.D., University of Massachusetts Amherst
Department
Biography
John Yargo (PhD, University of Massachusetts Amherst) is a Visiting 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.
Publications
Peer-Reviewed Articles
- “Did Environmental Catastrophe Have a Renaissance?” Shakespeare Studies 51 (2023, forthcoming).
- “The Erotics of Salvage in The Tempest.” Early Theatre 26.1 (2023, forthcoming).
- “Milton’s Postures: Prostrating, Grinding, Leaning.” Studies in Philology 119.3 (2022): 526-544. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/860979
- “Messengers Were Harmed in the Making of This History: Narrating the Past in Antony and Cleopatra.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 20.3 (2020): 58-84. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/786734
Public-Facing Writing
- “All This Life Made This Play”: An Interview with Keith Hamilton Cobb.” Los Angeles Review of Books (2019).
- “Kafka’s Vanished World: On Reiner Stach’s The Decisive Years and The Years of Insight.” The Millions (2016).
- “More Steps Than the Stairway of a Minaret: On Ahmad Faris Al-Shidyaq’s Leg Over Leg,” The Millions (2014).