Title/s: Surtz Associate Professor
Office #: Crown Center 407
Phone: 773.508.2683
Email: klecky@luc.edu
My research focuses on popular forms of intellectual history by studying the early modern publics mapped by cheap print, which constellated around certain catchwords and concepts to define what came to be seen as common and even natural to the national English character. My first book, Pocket Maps and Public Poetry in Renaissance England (Oxford, 2019), shows that the geographical imaginary fueling the cheap print works of mapmakers and poets prompted ordinary consumers to invest in the everyday practices of building the English commonwealth. My second book project, England’s Weedy Renaissance, demonstrates how seventeenth-century cheap print herbals forged a nativist strain of botanical practices and poetics that found in weeds the sturdy constitution of indigenous Englishness. I have also published on archive theory, premodern fictions of naturalization, spatial politics in early America, vegetable virtue ethics, and other topics. My work has earned fellowships from the ACLS and the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Renaissance Society of America, the Institute for Research in the Humanities at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Folger Shakespeare, Huntington, and Newberry Libraries.
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