Julian Yates

Associate Professor

Focusing on the lives of devices that contemporaries named “cunning” or “curious contrivances” (the portrait miniature, the relic, the privy, the printed text, and the priest-hole) Error, Misuse, Failure recasts the history of the English Renaissance as a series of “object lessons.” By tracing the stories generated to explain away a relic that is too easily faked, a miniature that is too curiously real, the stench of a failing privy, a book that persistently sheds its pages, or the presence of so much "papist trash" in an ostensibly reformed England, Yates plumbs the foundations of Renaissance culture in England to recover a curious language of mistakes, dirt, and parasitism that associates the failures of these "things" with the figures of Rome, Catholicism, and Sodom. The book offers a mode of historical inquiry rooted in material culture, sensitive to the way humans induct nonhumans (animals, plants, and manufactured things) into their communities.

"Error, Misuse, Failure is at once telling, compelling, informative, and entertaining. Beyond its own field of view, the English Renaissance, it engages perception and whatever causes us to ponder how we see, touch, feel, and sense the world around us."
-Tom Conley, Harvard University

"a genuinely fresh and intellectually challenging study of how perceiving subjects are related to objects in the world around them."
-Bruce R. Smith, University of Southern California

Current Research
My recent work focuses on adapting the critical language of material culture studies to accommodate “things” that were once alive (plants, animals, fungi). My encounter with what might be termed eco-criticism or ecology is evolving into a book with the working title “Renaissance Organics,” which traces the life of three material-semiotic actors in our discourses (sheep, oranges, and yeast). I am interested particularly in how attending to the chronologies of these three differently animated non-human actors or “things” offers us different ways of configuring human-authored texts, of timing those texts, and so to understanding the “work” of literary and cultural research. Two essays that give a flavor of this project are available at the following sites:

“Counting Sheep; Or, Dolly does Utopia (again)” http://rhizomes.net/issue8/yates2.htm

“What are things saying in Renaissance Studies?” http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/literature/profile?person=YatesJulian

For more information, see the English Department's faculty profile for Julian Yates.

Department of English, 212 Memorial Hall
University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716
Phone: 302.831.2361   Fax: 302.831.1586   Email: english@udel.edu