Joanna Huh

Post Doctoral Scholar

Fields of Interest

• Early Modern English Drama & Poetry
• Gender & Sexuality
• Queer Theory
• Political Philosophy
• Early Modern Theories of the Body & their Heterogenous Material/Linguistic Production

Joanna Huh is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at Vanderbilt University.

Her dissertation, entitled Damaging Intimacy: Reimagining Community in Early Modern Drama, details a literary preoccupation with staging violent losses of individual integrity as constitutive of community formation. Damaging Intimacy works to decenter liberal, individual self-possession, the hallmark of humanism whose advent has become readily coextensive with early modernity. Offering an urgent intervention into early modern literary studies in a time of disquieting local, national, and global trends toward political insularity and xenophobic tribalism, the project maintains that early modern drama anticipates the thinking of present-day community thinkers such as Judith Butler (community grounded in pre-contractual precarity), Jean-Luc Nancy (community as acceptance of strange intrusions), Roberto Esposito (community as self-expropriation), and Georges Bataille (community as ecstatic annihilation and destructive sacrifice).