Jessica C. Beckman
Assistant Professor, Department of English and Creative Writing
Jessica Beckman is an Assistant Professor of English specializing in early modern poetics and material culture. Her book The Kinetic Text (Penn Press, 2026) challenges the arbitrary division of literary studies from book history by illuminating how writers from the sixteenth century onward harness the natural dynamism of reading to produce poetic effects. Her next project, entitled Unstable Character in the English Renaissance, explores the nature of literary character before the rise of narrative realism. She teaches courses on literary history, early modern drama and poetry including Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, and the history of the book from William Shakespeare to Gertrude Stein.
Contact
Department(s)
English and Creative Writing
Education
- B.A. George Washington University
- M.A. Georgetown University
- Ph.D. Stanford University
Works In Progress
The Kinetic Text: A Poetics of Movement in the Age of Print (forthcoming 2026)
Although the compilers of Shakespeare's first folio address their work "to the great Variety of Readers," new attention to the history of reading and the materiality of texts has recovered great varieties within those readers. They read serially, discontinuously, and even spatially around the page; they read silently and aloud, in bed and at their desks, with pen in hand and with other books on their minds. Their reading was, as ours remains, a dynamic and variable enterprise.
The Kinetic Text introduces a new theory of early modern poetics that eschews the arbitrary division of literary studies from book history by demonstrating how writers harnessed the dynamism of reading to produce literary effects. Bridging new formalism, the history of reading, and the history of the book, The Kinetic Text redraws the canonical boundaries of early modern English poetics around the expressive potential of the material text.
Unstable Character in the English Renaissance
Unstable Character examines the physicality of literary character before the rise of narrative realism. How, it asks, do poets and dramatists theorize bodies that are made out of words? How are such bodies assembled and transformed? Unlike character criticism that focuses on neoclassicism, probability, or psychological consistency, this project investigates how early modern writers use literalized metaphors and transformed bodies to explore fiction as a kind of material existence.