Ineke Murakami

Ineke Murakami specializes in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and culture, with a focus on Shakespeare (and other drama), political theory, performance, and affect studies.

Her first book, Moral Play and Counterpublic, reassesses the English morality play as a medium of social commentary that conceals its critical function through literary and performance conventions. From its start in the fifteenth-century, “moral play” fostered a phenomenon ultimately more threatening to the peace of the realm than the theater or the notorious market―a political self-consciousness that gave rise to ephemeral, non-elite counterpublics.

Her current monograph explores the way performances, from court spectacle to street theater, repurpose religious affect as a kind of extrainstitutional politics with the power to reconceptualize community in seventeenth-century England.

Select Publications

• “Winstanley’s ‘Righteous Actors’: Performance, Affect, and Extraordinary Politics in the Seventeenth Century,” Theatre Survey 62, no.3 (in press, September 2021, Cambridge University Press).

• “Performance Beyond Drama.” Special issue, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 51, no. 3 (in press, September, 2021, Duke U.P.).

• “‛Her strong toil of grace’: Charismatic Performance from Queens to Quakers,” Shakespeare Survey 69 (2016): 166-180.

• “‛The Fairing of Good Counsel’: Allegory, Discretion, and Disgust in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair.” Disgust in Early Modern English Literature, 145-163. Edited by Barbara Correll and Natalie K. Eschenbaum. Routledge, 2016.

• “Reimagining the Republic.” James Kuzner. Open Subjects: Renaissance Republicans, Modern Selfhoods, and the Virtue of Vulnerability. Journal for Early Modern and Cultural Studies, 13.3, 2013.

• Moral Play and Counterpublic: Transformations in Moral Drama, 1465-1699. New York: Routledge, 2011.

• “Wager’s Drama of Convention, Class and State Constitution.” Studies in English Literature 47.2 (Spring 2007).

Select Teaching

Graduate Courses

• “Teaching Shakespeare in the 21st-Century,” seminar
• “Allegory: the Other Speaking of Fantasy,” seminar
• “Renaissance Bodies Politic,” seminar
• “English Renaissance Drama and Culture,” survey
• “Scandal of Excess: Early Modern Economics and Aesthetics,” seminar

Undergraduate Courses

• “Shakespeare and the Poetics of Revenge”
• “Shakescenes”
• “Medieval and Renaissance Mythbusting”
• “British Literary Traditions I: Survey”
• “Monsters and their Makers”: Introduction to Writing in English Studies”