Brooke A Conti

Brooke Conti is Professor of English at Cleveland State University, where she specializes in the literature and culture of seventeenth-century England. Her book, Confessions of Faith in Early Modern England was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2014; it explores the paradoxical relationship between autobiography and polemic in an age of religious conflict. She is also co-editor, with Reid Barbour, of a new scholarly edition of Thomas Browne's Religio Medici (vol. 1 of the Complete Works of Sir Thomas Browne; Oxford University Press, 2023). Dr. Conti's published articles include works on Milton, Shakespeare, and Donne in venues such as Renaissance Quarterly, Modern Philology, and Milton Studies. She is completing a second monograph, tentatively entitled "Nostalgia Reformed: Longing for the Early Church in Protestant England."

Some of her more recent work has gone in a different direction, investigating the place of writers such as Milton and Donne in postwar American culture; one such article, on Tony Kushner's conflicted engagement with Milton, was recently published in Contemporary Literature.

Dr. Conti's research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (in the form of a summer research stipend), as well as short-term fellowships at the Huntington Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.