Richard Halpern

Richard Halpern is Sir William Osler Professor of English at the Johns Hopkins University. After his receiving his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1983, he taught at Yale, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the University of California at Berkeley before arriving at Johns Hopkins in 2002. His areas of interest include Shakespeare, English Renaissance literature, modernism, literary theory, and very bad painting. He is the author of four books: The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Cornell UP, 1990), Shakespeare among the Moderns (Cornell UP, 1997), Shakespeare’s Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud and Lacan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), and Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence (University of Chicago Press, 2006).

His Guggenheim project, titled “Eclipse of Action: Tragedy and Political Economy,” will explore the ways in which stage tragedy adapts to a modern world in which ethical action is displaced in importance by productive activity.

Photograph by Alyssa Scheinson.