Matthew Ritger
Assistant Professor, Department of English and Creative Writing
Matthew Ritger studies English literature and culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a focus on Shakespeare, Milton, and special topics at the intersection of social and cultural history. His first book, Houses of Correction: Carceral Institutions and Humanist Culture in Early Modern England, is forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press in April 2026.
Contact
Department(s)
English and Creative Writing
Education
- Ph.D. Princeton University
- M.A. Princeton University
- M.F.A. Cornell University
- B.A. Dartmouth College
Selected Publications
"Hamlet's 'garbage' and the tragedy of waste," Modern Philology, forthcoming.
"Milton and the Literary Workhouse." Milton Studies, vol. 63 no. 2 (2021).
Works In Progress
Book Project
Houses of Correction: Carceral Institutions and Humanist Culture in Early Modern England
Forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press in April 2026
More than 250 years before the rise of the modern penitentiary, houses of correction pioneered the use of forced labor and individualized sentences within institutions of confinement, promoting reform and the "hope of amendment" for every individual. Yet these earlier carceral institutions faced many of the problems that remain familiar today: corruption scandals, recidivism, and abuses of power.
Houses of Correction returns to the archives of England's first house of correction, Bridewell, to show how humanist reformers provided ideas, justifications, and administration for what came to be called bridewells, workhouses, and "Literary worke-houses," even as repeated scandals made it clear that these coercive institutions would forever be at odds with the ideals of humanist culture. Examining how the work of writers including More, Shakespeare, and Milton dealt with humanism's entanglements with these new prisons, Houses of Correction constructs the first book-length literary history of some of early modern Europe's most influential carceral institutions.