Rachel Zhang

Rachel Dunn Zhang researches the intersection of politics, religion, and literary form in early modern literature. Her first book, Reimagining Constancy in the English Civil Wars (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), shows how the conservative language of constancy underwrites radical innovation in religiopolitical thought and literary form in the 17th century. Her work has also been published in Milton Studies, Ben Jonson Journal, Studies in Philology, Early Modern Women, The Seventeenth Century, and Notes and Queries. An authority on Hester Pulter, Zhang also is a contributing editor for The Pulter Project at Northwestern University. Her second book project embraces a transnational approach to early modern romance, examining how writers in Asia and Europe use romance’s characteristically digressive structure to examine the relationship between individual agency and higher authority.