Ineke Murakami

Ineke Murakami specializes in Renaissance literature and culture, with a focus on Shakespeare and drama, political theory, performance, affect, and religious studies.

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

Her current monograph explores the way different groups around the English Civil Wars use social performance to generate affective intensities, from charisma to dread. These belief-producing, prosocial intensities have long been associated with religion, but this project explores how they have been repurposed to fuel the kind of extrainstitutional politics that create deep structural change.

Select publications:

• “Winstanley’s ‘Righteous Actors’: Performance, Affect, and Extraordinary Politics in the Seventeenth Century,” Theatre Survey, 62.3 (Sept. 2021): 248-271.
• “Performance Beyond Drama,” Introduction, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, special issue, 51.3 (Sept. 2021): 387-395.
• “‛Her strong toil of grace’: Charismatic Performance from Queens to Quakers,” Shakespeare Survey 69 (Oct. 2016): 166-180.
• “‛The Fairing of Good Counsel’: Allegory, Discretion, and Disgust in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair.” Disgust in Early Modern English Literature. Eds. Barbara Correll and Natalie K. Eschenbaum. Routledge, May 2016: 145-163.
• Moral Play and Counterpublic: Transformations in Moral Drama, 1465-1599. New York: Routledge, 2011. Paperback edition 2019.
• “Wager’s Drama of Convention, Class and State Constitution.” Studies in English Literature 47, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 305-29
• “The ‘bond and privilege of nature' in Coriolanus.” Religion & Literature, 38.3 (March 2007): 121-36. ---. Reprinted. Shakespearean Criticism, 116 (October 2008).                                                                                                                            

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
     
•     Undergraduate Courses
  • “Shakespeare and the Poetics of Revenge”
  • “Shakescenes”
  • “Medieval and Renaissance Mythbusting”
  • “British Literary Traditions I: Survey”
  • "Shakespeare's Stuff: Material and Visual Culture"