Gustave Doré 's "Puss in Boots" from Perrault's Fairy Tales

Office: 319 Clemens Office Hours: Phone: 645-2575 ext. 1021 E-mail: jholstun@acsu.buffalo.edu

 

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I began teaching full-time in 1983. I have published essays on Shakespeare's Coriolanus, on the Ranters, and on lesbianism and Renaissance poetry. I edited a collection of essays on the English Revolution titled Pamphlet Wars.  My first book, A Rational Millennium, examines utopian practice and writing in the early modern Atlantic world.  It focuses on Thomas More and other European utopists (Andreae, Bacon, Campanella), the English classical republican James Harrington, and John Eliot (the "Apostle to the Indians" in the Massachusetts Bay Colony).

 My work is marxist, and I think marxist theory and political practice are more relevant now than ever, given the global dominance of the capitalist mode of production and American imperialism. During the last decade or so, I've moved from a new historicist approach based in post-structuralist theory to a marxist history-from-below approach based in the British marxist historians, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ernst Bloch, among others. This approach argues that theoretical consciousness is by no means the monopoly of professors, but is to be found at work in human activity as such, even (or especially) among exploited workers.  

At the moment (2005), I'm working on a book manuscript titled "Damned Commotion: Mid-Tudor Crisis and Late Tudor Culture." It focuses on Kett's Rebellion of 1549--the greatest revolutionary utopia of sixteenth-century English--and its literary aftermath. In connection with this project, I've published essays on Shakespeare and peasant rebellion and on John Heywood's The Spider and the Flie: an enormous insect allegory about Kett's Rebellion. I've also published essays on Marx's late studies of the Russian peasant commune, on the historical writing of Brian Manning, and on the cancer that killed my father and Mike Sprinker, the editor of my second book. I plan future essays on literature and culture in Buffalo, on Agnes Smedley's historical and fictional writing about class struggle in twentieth-century China, and on the comic fiction of Emile Habiby, the Palestinian communist and satirist. In the future, I'll probably be doing more work on modern proletarian and anti-colonialist writing, particularly that of the Arab world.

I've taught courses in premodern gay and lesbian writing (Sappho and Plato to Milton and Katharine Philips), the mid-Tudor crisis, Tudor English literature, Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe, Milton, Renaissance pastoral, revenge tragedy, colonial American literature, seventeenth-century Anglo-American literature, early modern women's writing, the radical Atlantic world of the 1790s, the proletarian epic, slave rebellions and maroon wars, Irish literature, literature and society in Western New York, Palestinian literature, literary theory, and Marxist cultural theory. I plan to offer similar courses in the future, and courses in Arabic fiction, Israeli and Palestinian literature, Georg Lukács, the socialist tradition in American literature, and world fiction.

AREAS OF SPECIALIZATION

World literature, marxism and communism, Renaissance English literature.

EDUCATION

1977            AB in English, minor in Classics, Georgetown University
1977-1980    Summer School of Criticism and Theory at the University of California, Irvine (UCI)
1979            MA in English, UCI
1983            PhD in English, UCI.  Thesis:  "Puritan Utopias of the Interregnum."  Professors
                    Harold E. Toliver (Chair), Robert L. Montgomery, and John Carlos Rowe

POSITIONS HELD

1983-1985    Lecturer, Department of English, UCLA
1985-1986    Lecturer, Department of English, UCI
1986-1991    Assistant Professor of English, University of Vermont (UVM)
1991-2000    Associate Professor of English, SUNY at Buffalo (UB)
2000-            Professor of English, UB

RESEARCH AND SCHOLARSHIP
Books

Author of A Rational Millennium:  Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-Century England and America.
    New York and London:  Oxford University Press, 1987. x + 371 pp.
Editor of Pamphlet Wars:  Prose in the English Revolution.  London:  Frank Cass, 1992; a hardcover
    reissue of Prose Studies 14.3 (1991).  viii + 230 p.
Author of Ehud's Dagger:  Class Struggle in the English Revolution.  London and New York:  Verso,
    September 2000.  xx + 460 pp.
In progress:  a book on peasant rebellions in early modern England.

ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS

"Tragic Superfluity in Coriolanus."  ELH 50.3 (1983):  485-507.
"John Eliot's Empirical Millenarianism."  Representations 1.4 (1983):  128-53.
"Literary Criticism and Theory." Ed. Toby Fulwiler and Arthur w. Biddle. Reading, Writing, and the study of Literature. New York: Random House, 1988. 71-92
"Will you rent our ancient love asunder?:  Lesbian Elegy in Donne, Marvell, and Milton."  ELH 54.4
    (1988):  835-67.
"Ranting at the New Historicism."  English Literary Renaissance 19.2 (1989):  189-226.
"Introduction" and "Rational Hunger:  Gerrard Winstanley's Hortus Inconclusus."  Prose Studies 14.3
    (1991):  1-13, 158-204.  Rpt. ed. James Holstun.  Pamphlet Wars:  Prose in the English
    Revolution.  London:  Frank Cass, 1992:  1-13, 158-204.
"Ehud's Dagger:  Patronage, Tyrannicide, and Killing No Murder."  Cultural Critique 25 (1992):
    99-142.
"'God bless thee, little David!':  John Felton and His Allies."  ELH 59.3 (1992):  513-52.
"Was Marx a Nineteenth-Century Winstanleyan?  Communism, George Hill, and the Mir."  Prose
    Studies 22.2 (1999):  121-48.  Rpt. ed. Andrew Bradstock, Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers 
    1649 (London:  Frank Cass, 2000):  121-48.
"Damned Commotion: Riot and Rebellion in Shakespeare's Histories." Ed. Richard Dutton and Jean Howard, The Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare: The Histories. London: Blackwell Publishing, 2003: 194-219.
"Pham Thai, Michael Sprinker, and John Holstun: Chemical Herbicide and the Indirect Costs of Production. Minnesota Review 58-60 (2003): 173-86.
"The Spider, the Fly, and the Commonwealth: John Heywood and Agrarian Class Struggle." ELH71.1 (Spring 2004): 53-88.
"Brian Manning and the Dialectics of Revolt." International Socialism Journal 103 (2004): 135-48.
"Comment: Historical Materialism and Early Modern Studies." Early Modern Culture 4. http://eserver.org/emc/1-4/holstun_response.html
"Response." Article-length response to four essays; Early Modern Culture.

PRIZES AND FELLOWSHIPS

1990-91 NEH Fellowship
2001 College of Arts and Sciences Award for Excellence in Teaching
2001 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Prize for Ehud's Dagger

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