Yulia Ryzhik
Yulia Ryzhik received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in English from Harvard University. Her dissertation, “Donne’s Spenser: A Problem in Literary History,” elucidates a hitherto unexamined relation between the poetry of John Donne (1572-1631) and that of his immediate predecessor, Edmund Spenser (1552-1599). This relation, at once antagonistic and emulative, provides the basis for a new, broader conception of the history of Renaissance poetics and the crucial transition from allegory to metaphor as the dominant instrument of poetic thinking. In this difficult transition, precipitated by the intellectual paradigm shifts of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, we can see the emerging terms of creative expression in the modern world. Ryzhik’s graduate studies were supported by several fellowships, including the Mellon, Paul and Daisy Soros, and Whiting. She also spent a semester as a Reader at the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti (Florence, Italy). Her publications include two articles, “Books, Fans, and Mallarmé’s Butterfly” (PMLA, May 2011) and “Chastening Pictures: Donne and Aretino” (forthcoming in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Joseph Connors, Olschki, 2012). At Princeton she will revise her dissertation for publication and begin research on a new book project on the culture of satire, anchored in the Renaissance (classical and continental influences on English satire; Shakespeare as a satirist), but also examining more generally the philosophical status of satirical hyperbole and the capacity of satire to generate reform. In 2012-2013 she will offer an upper-level English seminar on satire and will participate in the second half of the Humanistic Studies sequence, covering material from the Renaissance to Modernity.