Ineke Murakami

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

Her first book, Moral Play and Counterpublic, reassesses the English morality play as a medium of political analysis and commentary that conceals its critical function through literary and performance conventions. From its inception in the fifteenth-century, “moral play” fostered a phenomenon that was 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 that defined themselves against institutional forms of authority.

Her current monograph explores the way performances, from court to street, repurpose theological feelings as a kind of extraordinary politics that shapes the contours of political community in the seventeenth-century.

Select Publications

• “‛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

• “Renaissance Bodies Politic,” seminar
• “English Renaissance Drama and Culture,” survey
• “Scandal of Excess: Early Modern Economics and Aesthetics,” seminar
• “Other Speaking: Allegory in Early English Texts,” seminar

Undergraduate Courses

• “Shakespeare and the Poetics of Revenge”
• “Imagining Renaissance: Historiography and Performance in Renaissance Texts”
• “Shakescenes”
• “Monsters and their Makers”: Introduction to Writing in English Studies”