Michael Booth

Michael Booth is a lecturer in English at University College Cork, and author of Shakespeare and Conceptual Blending: Cognition, Creativity, Criticism. This book explores the recent cognitive theory of “conceptual blending” as a lens for literary study, and is, according to its Shakespeare Quarterly review, “the most valuable application of blending to Shakespeare’s texts to date.” (SQ, Fall 2020, 70-3). He has been awarded a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship and a John Carter Brown Library research fellowship, and held both teaching and administrative positions at Harvard University including Assistant Dean of the Harvard Summer School. He has published articles in Early Modern Culture and The Yale Journal of Criticism, as well as several edited collections. Since moving to Ireland, Michael has taught at UCC and at Maynooth, and has appeared on RTÉ Radio 1.

My research interests include, in a historical vein, the intellectual life and milieu of Sir Walter Raleigh—his personal relationships with Queen Elizabeth I, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Harriot—and his role in the Elizabethan colonization of both Ireland and the Americas. I have published articles on Raleigh and Harriot and am currently writing on Sidney. In a theoretical vein, I am interested in questions of thought, artistry and aesthetics, and in culture as the continual modification of ideas and practices by individuals. One example would be my ongoing research program concerning Harriot as both a linguist and a mathematician. Another would be the interest in Shakespeare’s creativity that I explored in Shakespeare and Conceptual Blending. One of my interests, as a Shakespearean, is in his sources and the use he made of them.

My teaching interests include: poetry of all periods; the relationship between poetry and verse; Shakespeare; classical antecedents and influences in early modern writing; New World encounters and the age of discovery; conceptual blending in art and culture.