Rambuss, Richard

Richard Rambuss

Nicholas Brown Professor of Oratory and Belles Lettres, Professor of English, Chair of English

Overview

Richard Rambuss, a native of Buffalo, NY, earned his BA at Amherst and PhD at Johns Hopkins. He joined the faculty at Brown in 2011 as Professor of English. He became Chair of the English Department and Nicholas Brown Professor of Oratory and Belles Lettres in 2018.

Profesor Rambuss specializes in English Renaissance literature and culture as well as film. Kubrick's Men, his newest book, has just been published by Fordham. It treats Kubrick's body of work as a sustained reflection on men and masculinity in strange or extreme circumstances. His other books are The English Poems of Richard Crashaw (Minnesota, 2014); Closet Devotions (Duke, 1998); and Spenser's Secret Career (Cambridge, 1993; paperback 2006). He is now at work on a book about the surprising role of Renaissance and classical literature in New Orleans Mardi Gras culture.

Prior to arriving at Brown, Professor Rambuss taught at Emory University, where he also served as Chair of the English Department. In 2009 he was the Visiting Hudson Strode Professor of Early Modern Studies at the University of Alabama.

Brown Affiliations

English

Research Areas

On the Web

"Weird Richard Crashaw"

"Two Wildly Different Poets"

The English Poems of Richard Crashaw

"Bringing Past Sex to Life is Complicated"

Research

Research Overview

Richard Rambuss's principal historical field is sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature and culture. He is most interested in Milton, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the metaphysical poets (especially Donne, Herbert, and Crashaw); devotional texts and images; and the Baroque. He also works on contemporary culture, especially film and photography. Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Lynch, along with war films, sports films, and the "men's film," are a particular focus. Questions about gender, sexuality, and desire--particularly male desire--tend to preoccupy him, whether he's studying movies or Renaissance poetry.

Research Statement

Richard Rambuss's scholarship moves back and forth between the Renaissance and contemporary culture. One of the ways in which these concerns come together is in his abiding interest in the "afterlife" of Renaissance writers and texts. He is currently writing a book called "Mardi Gras Milton" about the English literary traditions that inform nineteenth- and twentieth-century New Orleans Mardi Gras pageantry. It begins with the first of New Orleans's secret Carnival societies: the "Mistick Krewe of Comus," which pointedly took its name from Milton's masque. Its inaugural parade in 1857 was titled "The Demon Actors in Paradise Lost." Elaborate parades dedicated to Spenser, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Tennyson, Byron, and other English authors and texts followed in later years. His most recent book is Kubrick's Men about masculinity in extremis in Stanley Kubrick's films and photography. His essays and reviews have appeared in ELH, Camera Obscura, differences, SAQ, boundary 2, Shakespeare Studies, Shakespeare Quarterly, Exemplaria, and GLQ, in addition to many critical anthologies, including a piece on A Midsummer Night's Dream in Shakesqueer.

Scholarly Work

Kubrick's Men, Fordham University Press, 2022

Editor of The English Poetry of Richard Crashaw, University of Minnesota Press, 2014

"Crashaw and the Metaphysical Shudder; Or, How to Do Things with Tears." Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Cultural Expression," ed. Susan McClary, University of Toronto Press, 253-71

"Milton's Adam," in Approaches to Teaching Paradise Lost, ed. Peter C. Herman, Modern Language Association of America, 2012, pp. 95-100

"Ecstasy and the Cosmopolitan Soul," Ut pictura meditatio: The Meditative Image in Northern Art, 1500-1700, ed. Walter Melion, Ralph Dekoninck, and Agnes Guiderdoni-Bruslé, Brepols Publishers, 2012, pp. 425-446

"Crashaw's Style," in Redrawing the Map of Early Modern Catholicism, ed. Lowell Gallagher. University of Toronto Press, 2012, pp. 132-58

"After Male Sex," in After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory, ed. Janet Halley and Andrew Parker. Duke University Press, 2011, pp. 192-204

"A Midsummer Night's Dream," in Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Madhavi Menon. Duke University Press, 2011, 234-44

"The Straightest Story Ever Told," GLQ 17.4 (2011): 543-73

"Sacred Subjects and the Aversive Metaphysical Conceit: Crashaw, Serrano, Ofili," ELH 71.2 (2004): 497-530

"What It Feels Like For a Boy: Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis," in A Companion to Shakespeare's Works, Volume IV: The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays,, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard. Blackwell, 2003, pp. 240-59

"Spenser and Milton at Mardi Gras: English Literature, American Cultural Capital, and the Reformation of New Orleans Carnival." boundary 2 27.2 (2000): 45-72

"Machinehead." Camera Obscura 42 (1999): 96-123

Closet Devotions. Duke University Press, Series Q, 1998

Spenser's Secret Career. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, 1993 (paperback edition, 2006)

Background

Education and Training

Year	Degree	Institution
1990	PhD	The Johns Hopkins University
1987	MA	The Johns Hopkins University
1983	BA	Amherst College

Honors and Awards

Excellence in Teaching in the Humanities Award, Emory Center for Teaching and Curriculum, 2006

Nomination, 1999 Lambda Literary Award for Closet Devotions

Finalist, 1999 Publishing Triangle Award for Closet Devotions

Isabel MacCaffrey Prize, Spenser Society, 1993 (year's best essay on Spenser)

Researchers@Brown