Emily Jones

Associate Professor

CONTACT

Office: CPR 358-B
Phone: 813-974-9546
Email

• Curriculum Vitae

BIO

Emily Griffiths Jones’ research and teaching specializes in the literature of early modern England, with emphasis on Milton, Shakespeare, and women writers. Her first book, Right Romance: Heroic Subjectivity and Elect Community in Seventeenth-Century England, deals with intersections between genre, religion, and politics. The book argues for a recontextualized understanding of romance—as a multi-generic narrative structure or strategy rather than a prose genre, and as a cherished mode for Puritan republicans as well as royalists—and shows how English men and women turned to romance to construct diverse ideological communities for themselves as the chosen heroes of their nation’s turbulent history. Throughout her scholarship, Dr. Jones traces a vibrant literary tradition for anti-royalist writing in the period surrounding the English Civil War, and she explores early modern readers’ and writers’ passionate, playful, and queer emotional investments in texts. Her current book projects include:

• Milton in the Long 2020, about how and why Milton matters in our immediate political and cultural moment
• Odd Old Ends, with Matthew Carter, an edited collection about fannish literacies surrounding early modern texts
• Sappho, Shakespeare, Swift: Why Taylor is the Real Thing, with Jessica Cook and Michelle M. Taylor, on Taylor Swift's status as an emerging figure within the literary tradition

FOR PROSPECTIVE GRAD STUDENTS

Dr. Jones is committed to fostering students’ individual interests in early modern literature and genre studies. She has worked with graduate students on a diverse range of projects, including:

• early modern literature and eco-horror
• moral imagination in Spenser, Milton, and contemporary fantasy writers
• fan fiction as paracritical adaptation of Shakespeare
• post-medieval innovations in Shakespeare's romances

M.A. or Ph.D. students interested in working with Dr. Jones should begin by scheduling an in-person or virtual meeting to discuss their interests and goals.

EDUCATION

• Ph.D. and M.A., Boston University
• B.A., Randolph-Macon Woman's College

AREA OF SPECIALTY

Early modern literature, Milton, Shakespeare, women writers, romance and epic, gender and genre, biblical poetics, literature and seventeenth-century politics, fandom and popular culture, Taylor Swift studies.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

• Right Romance: Heroic Subjectivity and Elect Community in Seventeenth-Century England. Penn State University Press, 2019.
• “‘The Frontier of the Rebellion is Everywhere’: Andor, Antifascism, and the Soft Power of the Shakespeare Vibe.” In Odd Old Ends: Early Modern Literacies in Modern Fandom, edited by Matthew Carter and Emily Griffiths Jones. Forthcoming.
• “Surprised by Ken: Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) in Conversation with Paradise Lost.” Milton Studies. Forthcoming.
• “The Life of William Cavendish: Chivalric Historiography and Royalist Dissent.” In The Oxford Handbook of Margaret Cavendish, edited by Jacqueline Broad and Julie Crawford. Oxford University Press. Forthcoming.
• “Ladies in Conversation: Milton, Cavendish, and the Fanciful Politics of Authorial Self-Insertion.” In Cavendish and Milton: Rethinking Seventeenth-Century Literature and Culture, edited by Ann Baynes Coiro, Lara Dodds, and Lisa Walters. Oxford University Press. Forthcoming.
• “‘Matching with the accursèd Canaanites’: Lucy Hutchinson’s Foreign Queens, Religious Exogamy, and Race-Making.” In Race / Queer / Queens, edited by Mira 'Assaf and Urvashi Chakravarty. ACMRS Press, 2026.
• “Passive Obedience and the Problem of Tyranny in Rivall Friendship.” In Discovering Bridget Manningham’s Rivall Friendship, edited by Jean Brink. Amsterdam University Press, 2025.
• “Republican Women Writers.” In The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing, edited by Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith. Palgrave, 2024.
• “Intimate Creations: Margaret Cavendish and the Violent Desires of Fandom.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 21.3 (2021).
• “Not sparing Kings in what they did not right’: Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum and the King James Bible.” In Religion and the Early Modern British Marketplace, edited by Kristin Bezio and Scott Oldenburg. Routledge, 2021.
• “Global Performance and Local Reception: Teaching Hamlet and More in Singapore.” In Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare, edited by Wendy Beth Hyman and Hillary Eklund. Edinburgh University Press, 2019.
• “Hereditary Succession and Death in Thomas Dekker’s The Wonderful Year and Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy.” SEL 56.2 (2016).
•  “Beloved of All the Trades in Rome: Oeconomics, Occupation, and the Gendered Body in Coriolanus,” Shakespeare Studies 43 (2015).
• “‘My Victorious Triumphs Are All Thine’: Romance and Elect Community in Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder,” Studies in Philology 112.1 (2015).
• “Milton’s Counter-Revision of Romantic Structure in Paradise Regained,” Huntington Library Quarterly 76.1 (2013). Special issue on Paradise Regained edited by John Rogers.