Areas of Specialization

I specialize in English Renaissance literature, queer studies and psychoanalytic criticism. I am particularly interested in the history of sexuality – in how we conceptualize sexuality’s historicity with respect to the modern divide – and the history of “waste” as a category that encompasses the ideological, the material, the aesthetic, and the queer. My book, Playing Dirty: Sexuality and Waste in Early Modern Comedy (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) develops a playful (promiscuous, presentist, psychoanalytic) method of literary criticism while analyzing the eroticized production of waste in works by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Sir John Harington, Thomas Nashe, and Geoffrey Chaucer. With Vin Nardizzi and Stephen Guy-Bray, I am also the co-editor of Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze (Ashgate, 2009). This volume includes my essay on heterosexuality and Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Current projects include editing Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller and, with James Bromley, co-editing a volume tentatively titled Sex Before Sex: Eroticism and Representation in Early Modern England.

Publications

Books

Playing Dirty: Sexuality and Waste in Early Modern Comedy, forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 

Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze, ed. Vin Nardizzi, Stephen Guy-Bray, and Will Stockton (Ashgate Press, 2009) (Queer Interventions series). http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&title_id=10395&edition_id=11849&calcTitle=1 

Articles and Book Chapters

“Is There a History of Sexuality?” in Clinical Encounters: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory, ed. Noreen Giffney and Eve Watson (forthcoming) 

“Adam and Eve and the Failure of Heterosexuality,” in Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze, ed. Vin Nardizzi, Stephen Guy-Bray, and Will Stockton (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 207-227. 

“How to do the History of Heterosexuality: Shakespeare and Lacan,” forthcoming in Literature Compass (revision of “How to do the History of Heterosexuality”) 

“How to do the History of Heterosexuality,” forthcoming in Shakespeare Yearbook, issue on The Lacanian Renaissance (2009). 

“Reading Like a Sodomite: Deleuze, Donne, Eliot, Presentism, and the Modern Divide,” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 17 (2008). http://www.rhizomes.net/issue17/stockton.html 

“Cynicism and the Anal Erotics of Chaucer’s Pardoner,” Exemplaria 20.2 (Summer 2008): 143-64. 

“‘I am made an ass’: Falstaff and the Scatology of Windsor’s Polity,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 49.4 (2007): 340-60. 

Book Reviews 

“The Liberal World of Perversion,” forthcoming in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. A review of Safe, Sane, and Consensual: Contemporary Perspectives on Sadomasochism, ed. Darren Langdridge and Meg Barker (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Perversion: Psychoanalytic Perspectives / Perspectives on Psychoanalysis, ed. Dany Nobus and Lisa Downing (Karnac, 2006); and James Penney, The World of Perversion: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Absolute of Desire (SUNY Press, 2006).

Jerry Aline Flieger’s Is Oedipus Online?: Siting Freud After Freud (The MIT Press, 2005), in Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 11.2 (2006): 239-41.

Ian Frederick Moulton’s translation of Antonio Vignali’s La Cazzaria / The Book of the Prick (Routledge, 2003), in The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 5.2 (2005): 139-142.

Courses

Undergraduate: British Literature I; Medieval British Literature; Shakespeare; Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Literature; Literature and Gender; Introduction to Queer Theory 
 

Graduate: Shakespeare; Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Literature