Biography
Ross Lerner specializes in early modern British literature. At Binghamton, he teaches courses on authors such as Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton and on topics including punishment, persuasion, and premodern race and colonialism.
His first book, Unknowing Fanaticism: Reformation Literatures of Self-Annihilation, explores the crisis of religious fanaticism in Reformation Europe and its effects on politics and poetry. Love’s True Object: Spenser’s Amoretti, a short book co-written with Katie Kadue, is forthcoming from Amherst College Press. He has also published articles on the relationships between Renaissance poetry and law, religion, race, and gender, as well as on film, in venues such as ELH, Modern Philology, SEL, Exemplaria, The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Spenser Studies, Marvell Studies, and Discourse: A Journal of Theoretical Media Studies.
He is currently at work on a study of punishment and race in the literary, political, and religious imaginations of the premodern Atlantic world. Before joining Binghamton, Lerner taught at Occidental College, Princeton University, Haverford College, and prisons in New Jersey.
Publications
- “Imperial Boomerangs: Milton and Marvell on the Curse of Ham,” ELH 93.4 (Winter 2026).
- “In Conversation: The Lady Eve and Stanley Cavell,” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 46.1 (2024), 77-111.
- “Civil Death in Early Modern England,” Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory 32.4 (2021), 326-45.
- “Allegorization and Racialization in The Faerie Queene,” Spenser Studies 35, special issue on Spenser and Race, ed. Dennis Austin Britton and Kimberly Coles (2021), 107-32.
- “‘Doubly Resounded’: Narcissus and Echo in Petrarch, Donne, Wroth,” Modern Philology 118.2 (2020), 159-80.
- “The Astonied Body in Paradise Lost,” ELH 87.2 (2020), 433-61.
Education
- PhD, Princeton University
- BA, Haverford College
Teaching Interests
- Medieval and Renaissance literature
- History of poetry
- History of race and incarceration
- Theories of rhetoric and persuasion
Honors and Awards
- Linda and Tod White Teaching Prize, Occidental College (2021)
- Center for Teaching Excellence Teaching Award, Occidental College (2026)