Jay Zysk

faculty

Jay Zysk, PhD

Director

Office of Faculty Development

Interim Associate Dean

College of Arts & Sciences

Contact

508-910-6534

jzysk@umassd.edu

Claire T. Carney Library 215

Contact

508-999-8036

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Liberal Arts 370

Education

2011Brown UniversityPhD
2007Brown UniversityMA
2005Stonehill CollegeBA

Teaching

  • Shakespeare
  • Early English drama
  • British literature 1300-1700
  • Literary theory

Teaching

Programs

Research

Research activities

  • Advisory Board, Literature, Routledge Resources Online: The Renaissance World
  • Subject Editor, British Isles and Northern Europe, Routledge Resources Online: The Renaissance World
  • Subject Editor, "British Isles and Northern Europe," Routledge Encyclopedia of the Renaissance World
  • Weinmann Family Fellowship, Folger Shakespeare Library (2014)
  • Teaching Medieval Drama and Performance, Folger Shakespeare Library Yearlong Colloquium (2016)

Research

Research interests

  • Shakespeare and early modern drama
  • Literature and the Reformation
  • Periodization studies
  • Early modern histories of the body
  • Shakespeare and pedagogy

Select publications

Jay Zysk received his PhD in English literature from Brown University. His research and teaching focus on early British literature, Shakespeare, early English drama, and Shakespeare and pedagogy. 

His published work focuses on intersections between theology and drama, as well as between religion and secularity, across the medieval/early modern divide. He is the author of Shadow and Substance: Eucharistic Controversy and English Drama across the Reformation Divide (University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), and co-editor (with Katherine Steele Brokaw) of Sacred and Secular Transactions in the Age of Shakespeare (Northwestern University Press, 2019).

His current work focuses on Shakespeare and pedagogy. With Rachael Deagman Simonetta, he is authoring a book on "Shakespeare and Blended Learning," under contract with Cambridge University Press, which aims to transform traditional models of face-to-face teaching of Shakespeare's plays with innovative and experimental pedagogies that thoughtfully integrate physical and digital modes of learning. 

In addition, Professor Zysk has published several essays on Shakespeare and early modern drama in Christianity and Literature, English Literary Renaissance, postmedieval, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and a number of edited book collections. In 2014, he received a short-term fellowship from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, and in 2016 participated in a yearlong colloquium on “Teaching Medieval Drama” at the Folger. 

From 2019-2024 he served as Director of the Office of Faculty Development at UMass Dartmouth. Effective January 1, 2025, he will assume the role of interim Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at UMass Dartmouth.

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