Interests

Renaissance / 17th-Century British, Theory & Criticism, Gender / Sexuality Studies, literary and political cultures of early modern English Catholicism, early modern prose fiction, Spenser studies, and narrative theory.

Selected Publications

Medusa's Gaze: Casuistry and Conscience in the Renaissance (Stanford UP, 1991) and articles on a wide range of topics: Shakespeare, English Catholic devotional culture in the Renaissance, postmodern ethics and hermeneutic theory, and nineteenth-century opera. Recent articles include: “Imagining Baroque Ethics: John Evelyn and the Case of the Stigmatic ‘Working Wench,’” Religion and Literature (2007); "Faustus's Blood and the (Messianic) Question of Ethics," ELH 73 (2006); "Waiting for Gobbo," in Spiritual Shakespeares, ed. Ewan Fernie (Routledge, 2005); and "Balloons and Guillotines: Francis Poulenc's Ethics of Mutilation," RS-SI: Recherches Semiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry 23 (2003). He is co-editor with Patricia Juliana Smith and Frederick S. Roden of Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006)

Additional Information

He is currently completing a book on the representational history of the biblical figure of Lot's wife, from patristic exegetical cultures to late modern visual and literary cultures, and is co-editing with Shankar Raman an essay collection, “Shakespeare and the Senses,” which addresses the recent critical turn to historical phenomenology and early modern discourses on the senses. Professor Gallagher has been a member of the Modern Language Association Shakespeare Division Executive Committee (2002-07) and serves on the Advisory Board of Shakespeare, journal of the British Shakespeare Association. In recent years he has also served on the MLA Spenser Society Executive Committee, and has served as book review editor for Quidditas: Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association.

Upcoming Mellon Seminar Readings

Jack Miles Mellon seminar (pdf), November 10, 2008.
"Thinking Religion" Calendar of Events.(pdf)
- Life of William Robertson Smith
- Mr. William Robertson Smith Interviewed
- Answer to the Form of Libel
Background material for Hent de Vries' lecture(pdf)
Background material for Avivah Zornberg’s lecture, April 29, 2009(pdf)

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