Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts

Russ Leo holds a Ph.D. from the Program in Literature at Duke University. His dissertation, "Affect Before Spinoza: Reformed Faith, Affectus, and Experience in Jean Calvin, John Donne, John Milton and Baruch Spinoza," investigates affective approaches to faith in order to account for the revelatory and revolutionary possibilities of poetry, theology and philosophy in early modernity. His interdisciplinary interests span early modern studies, theology, gender and sexuality studies, philosophy and literary theory. He earned a B.A. in English from SUNY College at Fredonia, and at Duke won numerous scholarships for his graduate work, including grants to attend The Folger Institute in Washington, D.C. He also received graduate certificates in Feminist Studies and Interdisciplinary Medieval and Renaissance Studies from Duke University. Leo has published on topics ranging from Augustine and Milton to Spinoza and Lacan.  Since arriving at Princeton Leo has taught a Freshman Seminar on gender, belief and agency in early modern drama and poetry; courses in English, including " The Golden Age: Seventeenth-Century Anglo-Dutch Literature, Art and Culture" and "Reformation Poetry and Drama"; and also served on the faculty for Humanistic Studies 217-218. In the coming year he will teach "The English Drama to 1700," a survey of texts and dramatic techniques from the late Middle Ages to the Restoration in which students will follow the vicissitudes of sin and sexuality on the English stage.  At Princeton Leo will develop his earlier investigations of affect and faith into a more comprehensive book project, tentatively titled Reformation Tragedy: Affect and Necessity, a work that examines the philosophico-theological purchase of tragedy in early modernity by tracing the importance of tragedy across diverse early modern disciplines, looking closely at work by William Shakespeare, Fulke Greville, Milton, and the Dutch dramatic society Nil Volentibus Arduum, as well as Calvin, Daniel Heinsius, David Pareus, Spinoza, and the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editors and translators of Aristotle's Poetics.  He will also begin a series of articles on Milton, Spinoza and the larger contexts of seventeenth-century Anglo-Dutch poetry and drama as well as a history of affect and politics in psychoanalytic writing.  Leo will join the Faculty in the English Department at Princeton University in Fall 2012.