Noel Capozzalo
Lecturer of Literature
Noel Capozzalo’s research and teaching focus on seventeenth-century English literature and the mid-twentieth-century Black radical tradition. He will complete doctoral work in English at the CUNY Graduate Center in May 2023. His dissertation, Reason of State, Participation, and Obedience: Imagining Political Order in Seventeenth-Century England, brings the broad discursive context of late humanist statecraft to bear on the poetry of John Milton and Andrew Marvell, the drama of Shakespeare and Samuel Daniel, and the political prose of Thomas Hobbes and James Harrington. Generally, his work in early modern literature and politics aims to complicate classical humanism’s role in the emergence of Enlightenment political thought.
More About Me
He has taught courses on Shakespeare, Ralph Ellison, and Malcolm X at Medgar Evers College (CUNY) and Baruch College (CUNY). An early version of his dissertation chapter on James Harrington was awarded the Renaissance Studies Certificate Program’s Graduate Essay Prize at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is currently working on two articles: one considers Harrington’s engagement of political romance in his Oceana, and the other traces a Neostoic ethic of plain speech in Shakespeare’s King Lear.