Dr. Brian Lockey
Associate Professor
B.A., Swarthmore College, with Honors in English Literature.
M.A., University of Sussex, Brighton. U.K., with Distinction in Critical Theory of English Literature.
Ph.D., Rutgers University, English Literature, Specialty in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, Shakespeare, and critical theory.
Research Focus: Early Modern Literature
Brian Lockey teaches Early Modern literature and culture, including Shakespeare. His most recent book, Early Modern Catholics, Royalists, and Cosmopolitans: English Transnationalism and the Christian Commonwealth (Ashgate 2015), looks at how the perspective of 16th-century English Catholic exiles and 17th-century English royalist exiles helped to generate a form of cosmopolitanism that was rooted in, but also transcended, contemporary religious and national identities. In the book, which is published as part of Ashgate’s Transculturalisms 1400-1700 series, Lockey considers the experiences of English exiles and the influence that they had on writers such as Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Anthony Munday, Sir John Harrington, Sir Richard Fanshawe, John Milton, and Aphra Behn. In addition, Lockey is the author of Law and Empire in English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge UP, 2006, Paperback edition 2009), which suggests that early modern fiction played a significant role in the discursive formation of legal imperialism. He has co-edited a special issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, entitled The Spanish Connection: Historical and Literary Perspectives on the Empires, he contributed a chapter on Shakespeare and Empire to the Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare, ed. A. Kinney (Oxford UP, 2011), and he has a chapter on Colonialism and the New World in the forthcoming volume, Edmund Spenser in Context, ed. A. Escobedo (Cambridge UP, 2016). His articles have appeared in English Literary Renaissance, the Journal of the History of Ideas, the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and in the volume, Representing Imperial Rivalry in the Early Modern Mediterranean, eds. B. Fuchs, E. Weissbourd (Toronto, 2015).