The Bard Redeemed
Welcome to the personal portal of Jean Feerick, where classical scholarship meets contemporary insight. Journey through the timeless works of William Shakespeare with scholarly depth and theatrical passion.
Dr. Jean Feerick
Scholar, Professor, and Passionate Advocate for the Bard
Jean Feerick is a dedicated Shakespearean scholar with over two decades of experience in literary analysis, teaching, playgoing, editing, and academic research. Her work bridges the gap between classical interpretation and modern understanding, bringing Shakespeare's timeless themes to contemporary audiences.
Through rigorous scholarship and passionate engagement with the text, Jean has developed a unique perspective on Shakespeare's plays, sonnets, and their enduring relevance. Her insights have been featured in academic journals, blogs, and literary conferences worldwide.
This portal serves as a gathering place for Jean's articles, reflections, reviews, and ongoing dialogue with fellow enthusiasts of Shakespeare's extraordinary body of work and its many modern adaptations.
Books
Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in Renaissance England
Explores how early modern writers challenged traditional human exceptionalism by depicting porous boundaries between human beings, plants, animals, and physical matter.
Publications
An early modern ecocritical and posthumanist work that re-evaluates how Renaissance literature defined—and blurred—the boundaries of humanity.
The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature
Peer Reviewed Articles
“Cosmic Conversions and Timon’s Block,” Renaissance Drama, special forum on “Affective Ecology,” 51.2 (2023), 202-22.
“Economies of Nature in Shakespeare,” special forum on “Shakespeare and Ecology,” ed. Julian Yates and Garrett Sullivan, Shakespeare Studies 39 (2011), 32-42.
“Tragicomic Transformations: Passion, Politics and the ‘Art to Turn’ in Fletcher’s Island Princess,” Special Issue: “Shakespeare and Embodiment,” ed. David McInnis and Brett D. Hirsch, Early Modern Literary Studies 19 (2009), 3.1-24. <URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/emlshome.html>.
“Botanical Shakespeares: The Racial Logic of Plant Life in Titus Andronicus,” Special Issue: Shakespeare & Science, edited by Carla Mazzio, South Central Review 26.1 (March, 2009), 82-102.
“‘Divided by soyle’: Plantation and Degeneracy in The Tempest and The Sea Voyage,” Renaissance Drama 35 (2006), 27-54.
“The Alien Forms of Race in Early Modern England,” Letters: The Semiannual Newsletter of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities 14, 21 (2006): 1-4.
“‘A Nation Now Degenerate’: Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, Nova Britannia, and the Role of Diet and Climate in Reproducing Races,” Early American Studies 1,2 (2003): 30-70.
“Spenser, Race, and Ireland,” English Literary Renaissance 32 1 (2002): 85-117.
Peer Reviewed Chapters
“Feeling Cosmic: Agentic Materialism in Titus Andronicus and Macbeth” in The Oxford Handbook to Shakespeare and the Natural World, ed. Todd Borlik and Karen Raber (forthcoming 2026).
“Matter, nature, cosmos: The scientific art of the early modern stage” in The Arden Handbook to Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama: Perspectives on Culture, Performance and Identity, ed. Michelle Dowd and Tom Rutter (Arden, 2023), 201-217.
“Race, Environment, and Culture: ‘Custome into Nature’ in the Early Modern Atlantic World” in A Cultural History of Race in the Reformation and the Enlightenment (1550-1760): Volume 4, ed. Nicholas Hudson, 6 vols., gen ed. Marius Turda (Bloomsbury Press, 2021), 33-54.
“Race and Colonization” in A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies, ed. John Lee (John Wiley & Sons, 2017), 43-56.
“Shakespeare and classical cosmology” in The Routledge Research Companion to Shakespeare and Classical Literature, ed. Sean Keilen and Nick Moschovakis (Routledge, 2017), 171-89.
“Poetic Science: Wonder and the Seas of Cognition in Bacon and Pericles” in The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science, ed. Howard Marchitello and Evelyn Tribble (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 423-444.
“The Imperial Graft: Horticulture, Hybridity, and the Art of Mingling Races in Henry V and Cymbeline” in A Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, Race, ed. Valerie Traub (Oxford University Press, 2016), 211-27.
“‘Rude Uncivill Blood’: The Pastoral Challenge to Hereditary Race in Fletcher and Milton” in The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500-1900, ed. Ralph Bauer, Kimberly Anne Coles, Zita Nunes, and Carla L. Peterson (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 65-83.
“Groveling with Earth in Kyd and Shakespeare’s Historical Tragedies” in The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature,” Jean Feerick and Vin Nardizzi, eds. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 231-52.
Co-authored with Vin Nardizzi, “Introduction: Swervings: On Human Indistinction,” The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 1-12.