Bio

Joseph Kidney is a Lecturer for Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE). He received a PhD in English Literature from Stanford University in 2024. An early modernist, his work looks at sixteenth-century literature, particularly drama, against the backdrop of the European and English Reformations. His dissertation examined the sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory projects of Reformation and Renaissance as they drastically reshaped intellectual culture and gave rise to new forms of vernacular literature. In this project and elsewhere, he has a particular interest in classical reception, rhetorical theory, early modern humanism, Renaissance comedy, and the cultural transformations regarding attitudes to the dead.

His academic publications include work on the dramatists Nicholas Udall, William Shakespeare, and John Webster, drawing on early modern thought ranging from theology to proto-scientific treatises. Other work supplements these historicist approaches with twentieth- and twenty-first-century methodologies derived from queer theory, considerations of metatheatre, and genre theory. He has also published on pedagogy, articulating strategies for teaching old plays in modern classrooms. He has taught, as instructor of record, classes on Shakespeare and on Renaissance Literature, and served as a teaching assistant for literary surveys from Beowulf to Jane Austen, as well as for Poetry and Poetics. He has worked as an assistant editor for the Stanford Global Shakespeare Encyclopedia and as a Graduate Coordinator for Stanford's Renaissances working group.

Outside of academia, he works as a poet. He is the author of Devotional Forensics (icehouse poetry), winner of the Griffin Poetry Canadian First Book Prize and a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Best Canadian Poetry and are forthcoming in The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, Copper Nickel, The Cincinnati Review, and TriQuarterly. He won a National Magazine Award Gold Medal for Poetry and the Poem of the Year award from Arc Poetry Magazine. He has been supported by the Banff Centre, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Civitella Ranieri.

Academic Appointments

  • COLLEGE Lecturer, Civic, Liberal, and Global Education

Professional Education

  • PhD, Stanford University, English Literature (2024)
  • MA, McGill University, English Literature (2016)
  • BA & Sc., McGill University, Organismal Biology and English Literature (2014)

2026-27 Courses