Appelbaum, Robert 1952–

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Appelbaum, Robert 1952–

PERSONAL: Born February 2, 1952, in New York, NY; children: one. Education: University of Chicago, B.A., 1975; San Francisco State University, M.A.; University of California at Berkeley, Ph.D. 1997. Hobbies and other interests: Walking, racquet sports, cooking, eating.

ADDRESSES: Home—Bailrigg, Lancaster, England. Office—Department of English and Creative Writing, Bowland College, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YT, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer and educator. University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, visiting assistant professor of English and comparative literature, 1997–99; University of Alabama at Birmingham, visiting assistant professor of English, 1999–2000; University of San Diego, San Diego, CA, postdoctoral fellow, 2000–03; Lancaster University, Lancaster, England, lecturer in Renaissance studies, 2003–.

MEMBER: Modern Language Association, Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies.

AWARDS, HONORS: Shrout Short Story Award, 1992, 1993; Elizabeth Mills Crothers Fiction Award, 1994; Eugenio Battisti Award for best essay of 1997, Society for Utopian Studies, 1997, for "Utopian Dubrovnik, 1659: An English Fantasy"; faculty summer research fellowship and humanities and arts research grant, both University of Cincinnati University Research Council, 1998; summer seminar award, National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), 1999; summer institute award, NEH, 2000; short-term fellowships from Folger Shakespeare Library and Newberry Library, both 2000–01; research fellowship, Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University, 2003–04; British Academy grant, 2005.

WRITINGS:

Literature and Utopian Politics in Seventeenth-Century England, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2002.

(Editor, with John Wood Sweet, and contributor) Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World, University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.

Contributor to A Student Companion to Shakespeare, edited by Joseph Rosenblum, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), in press. Contributor of short stories to Side Show 97, Somersault Press, 1996, and to periodicals, including Fiction International. Contributor of articles and reviews to scholarly journals, including the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, Milton Quarterly, Modern Philology, Prose Studies, Utopian Studies, Clio, and Shakespeare Quarterly.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Aguecheek's Beef, Belch's Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, and Food among the Early Moderns, for University of Chicago Press; Pandosto: The Triumph of Time, a novel; "Milton and Terrorism: The Gunpowder Poems," an essay.

SIDELIGHTS: Academician Robert Appelbaum has focused his research on the literature of the early modern era, particularly that literature's relationship to the political changes of the time. His first book, Literature and Utopian Politics in Seventeenth-Century England, examines the variety of visions of an "ideal world" that were in circulation in England between 1603 and 1670. These sixty-seven years saw many political disruptions in England, including the crowning of Scotland's King James VI as King James I of England in 1603, the English Civil Wars between the royalists and parliamentarians from 1642 to 1651, and the execution of King Charles I in 1649. Because of these many upheavals, particularly the protracted struggle between the royalists, who supported the right of the monarch to rule absolutely, and the parliamentarians, who wanted the gentry to have more rights and more power, a substantial discourse on the ideal political order occurred in England during those years. The texts Appelbaum discusses include not only such canonical utopian novels as New Atlantis, by English philosopher and writer Francis Bacon, and The Man in the Moone, by English ecclesiastic Francis Godwin, but also sermons, tracts, and other less-frequently studied writings. "Appelbaum's particular combination of rhetorical and historical analysis is part of an important and growing trend toward considering the mentality of a period as a whole," Marc Geisler commented in Albion, "and his approach is a welcome and fresh alternative to the revisionist histories and the new historicisms that have dominated literature studies" in the 1980s and 1990s. J.C. Davis, writing in Utopian Studies, expressed some concerns over Appelbaum's conclusions yet described the book as "a complex and wide-ranging study" that is "full of good things, rich in insight and interest."