Rachel Zhang
Assistant Professor, School of Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies
Dr. 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 been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including Milton Studies, Ben Jonson Journal, Studies in Philology, Early Modern Women, The Seventeenth Century, and Notes and Queries. An authority on Hester Pulter, Dr. Zhang is a contributing editor and reviewer 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.
Courses
- Literary Foundations
- Topics in Global Literature
- Topics in Literature
- MA Project
Academic Work
- 2026, “Contesting Language in the Seventeenth Century—and Now,” Edinburgh University Press Blog, Edinburgh University Press
- 2025, “The Sons of Bensalem: Unity and Election in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis,” Ben Jonson Journal 32.1: 70-98
- 2024, Reimagining Constancy in the English Civil Wars, Edinburgh University Press
- 2023, “Suppressed Polemic in Thomas Stanley’s Cambridge Manuscript,” Notes and Queries
- 2019, “Cuckoo Constancy? Paradise Regained and the Book of Common Prayer Debates,” Milton Studies 61.1: 111-137
- 2019, “A Certain Blindness: Providence, Romance, and Calvin in John Barclay’s Argenis,” Studies in Philology 116.2: 303-327
- 2018, “Crafting Un-Fortune: Rape, Romance and Resistance in Hester Pulter’s The Unfortunate Florinda,” Early Modern Women Journal 12.2: 76-98
- 2018, The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, directed by W. Wall and L. Knight. Winner of Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender’s Best Project in Digital Scholarship, New Media, or Art (2018), MLA Prize for Collaborative, Bibliographical, or Archival Scholarship (2020)
- 2015, “Breaking a Tradition: Hester Pulter and the English Emblem Book,” The Seventeenth Century 30: 55-73. Article included in The Seventeenth Century’s Virtual Special Issue on “Early Modern Women’s Writing,” 2018