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Gavin Hollis joined the Hunter faculty in 2008. He received his Ph.D in English Language and Literature
from the University of Michigan in 2008.
His teaching and research interests revolve around 16th and 17th century literature and culture (especially Shakespeare and his contemporary dramatists). He
focuses in particular on issues relating to travel,
colonialism, empire, trade, space, place, landscape and
cartography, and race and ethnicity.
He is working on a book project entitled The Absence of
America on the Early Modern Stage, which asks why
Renaissance drama’s response to English settlement in
the New World was muted, even though the so-called
golden age of Shakespeare coincided with the so-called
golden age of exploration. No play performed before the
closure of the theatres in 1642 is set in the Americas.
Few plays treat colonization as central to the plot. A
handful features Native American characters (most of
whom are Europeans in disguise). It was only in the
interregnum and Restoration periods that America took
to the stage. However, advocates of colonialism in the
seventeenth century denounced playing companies as
enemies to their cause on a par with the Pope and the
Devil. In order to understand both the nature of these
criticisms and the sympathies of players, playwrights,
and their audiences towards transatlantic enterprise and
settlement, the book juxtaposes a number of sites of
cultural performance: playhouse drama, court masques,
civic pageants, and colonialist texts such as sermons,
travel accounts, overseas trading company documents,
and maps and other cartographic/geographical records.It argues that although early modern drama did not
represent America directly, it articulated and
disseminated concerns about English activity in the New
World that were common in London at the time of the
establishment of the first transatlantic colonies.
He has also published articles on King Lear’s map and
early seventeenth century understandings of
cartography (“‘Give me the map there’: King Lear and
Cartographic Literacy in Early Modern England”
(published in The Portolan and winner of the 2006 Walter
W. Ristow Prize for essays in the History of
Cartography), and has an article on the little-known
German explorer of the Blue Ridge Mountains, John
Lederer (“The Wrong Side of the Map? The Cartographic
Encounters of John Lederer”) forthcoming in a collection
entitled Early American Cartographies.
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