Category:John Kuhn

John Kuhn is completing a monograph entitled Making Pagans: Theatrical Practice and Comparative Religion in Early Modern England, which examines the connections between the spectacular staging of "pagan" rituals in public theater plays and the developing study of comparative religion in seventeenth-century England. This is based on his dissertation, which won an Honorable Mention for the J. Leeds Barroll dissertation prize from the Shakespeare Association of America in 2017. In addition to this book, he is working on several smaller projects that address other aspects of seventeenth-century stage practice, including one article on sudden deaths by "broken heart" in Jacobean drama, a second on the display of dead bodies onstage in domestic tragedy (a sensationalist tragic subgenre), and a third that thinks through the implications of the display of imported Mesoamerican craft-work (particularly rope-work) in English plays.