Meet Assistant Professor Beatrice Bradley
What is Assistant Professor Beatrice Bradley’s favorite work to teach? “John Donne’s Holy Sonnets,” says the scholar of early modern literature. “They’re delightfully weird poems, strange and visceral. But they also demand an investigation of form that can get students excited about reading the specific particularities of poetic address.”
Joining the English faculty this past fall, Bradley started off by teaching undergraduate Shakespeare and the graduate seminar “Early Modern Trauma Studies.” The assistant professor is also at work on a book project examining how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers illustrate “the vitality and lifeforce of a human being” by paying attention to a substance most contemporary writers avoid contemplating: sweat. Poets, playwrights and prose writers such as Donne, Shakespeare, and Spenser, Bradley says, “locate that which we shed (sweat but also hair, fingernails, skin cells, etc.) as integral to the human body—even after the materials’ disposal.”
What inspired your book project "The Erotics of Sweat: Residues of Embodiment in the Early Modern World"?
My interest in this topic came from a course I took during graduate school at the University of Chicago with my mentor, Timothy Harrison. The course was titled “Early Modern Natality.” I couldn’t understand why Adam wakes up in Milton’s Paradise Lost bathed in a fragrant sweat, immediately following his creation. I kept asking, why is Adam sweating prior to the curse of Genesis, and prior to any movement or ingestion of food? Reading early modern midwifery treatises that position sweat as foundational to delivery and necessary to the infant’s well-being helped me begin to answer this question but also raised a lot of other ones.
What are you most excited about in joining the English faculty at the University of Minnesota?
Honestly, everything. I’m excited to join an English department that prioritizes research and with such exceptional scholars on the faculty. And I’m excited to be at a public institution that contributes to its local community and the state. I love hearing about what my students are working on: there are so many different fields represented at the University, and I find that this capaciousness makes it a dynamic intellectual place.
Where did you grow up? Is there anything you miss?
I grew up on the East Coast, for the most part on the shoreline of Connecticut. I miss the ocean! And New York City bagels. I am enjoying the Twin Cities lake life, though.
What is the most intriguing book you've read this year?
I loved Whitney Sperrazza’s Anatomical Forms: The Science of the Body in Early Modern Women’s Poetry (Penn, 2025). It does beautiful theoretical work in thinking about the relationship between literary form and scientific thinking; and it is impeccably researched, bringing in not only lesser-examined early modern women’s writing but also a range of other unusual archival sources, such as treatises in anatomy (as the title suggests!).
What's the next project?
I have been really interested in failures of empathy in early modern writing, in which the failure results from a structural or formal imbalance rather than cruelty or a lack of feeling. A main example that cycles through premodern texts is the apostles’ inability to understand Christ’s suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before his crucifixion. They want to understand, but they can’t. Early modern authors pick up and replicate this desire for shared feeling that ultimately fails in order to represent other, more common relationship tensions that exist without a divine counterpart.
