Bio

Julia Lupton, circa 2009

Julia Reinhard Lupton is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Associate Dean of Research for the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. In 2013-14, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her book project, “Shakespeare Dwelling: Habitation, Hospitality, Design.” In 2013-14 she served as Interim Chair for the Department of English. From 2010 to 2012, she directed UCI’s Program in Jewish Studies. In 2007, she was named a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California, Irvine, in recognition of her contributions to Shakespeare studies. In 2014, she was elected Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America.  She serves as dramaturg for UCI’s New Swan Shakespeare Festival. She and her husband Ken Reinhard live in Irvine and are the parents of Hannah, Isabel, Lucy and Eliot Reinhard.

Julia’s most recent scholarly books are Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life (Chicago, 2011) and Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago Press, 2005). She is also author of Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology and Renaissance Literature (Stanford, 1996) and co-author with Kenneth Reinhard of After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (Cornell, 1992). She is the co-editor with Graham Hammill of Political Theology and Early Modernity (Chicago 2011) and has collaborated with Jen Rust and David Pan on two volumes on Schmitt and Shakespeare.

She is the co-author with Ellen Lupton of two trade books on design, “DIY Kids” (Princeton Architectural Press) and “Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things” (St. Martin’s Press).

Her current project is entitled “Shakespeare Dwelling: Habitation, Hospitality, Design.” The book aims to use the visual, cognitive, and phenomenological resources of design theory to disclose the many points of creative contact between formal and vernacular acts of design on Shakespeare’s stage. The emphasis will fall on the life of objects (developed via affordance, user, and interobjectivity studies), the design of space (supported by excurses into architecture and urbanism), the management of time (supplemented by phenomenology and political theology), and housekeeping and hospitality (filled out via vernacular design discourses from the Renaissance to the present). The book will supplement discourses developed within the disciplines of design with more broadly theoretical writings on biopower in order to probe the design/life interface in both its Renaissance and its contemporary formations. The book is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

Other projects include editing the Arden Critical Guide to Romeo and Juliet and co-editing with David Goldstein a volume on Shakespeare and hospitality for Routledge.

MAJOR PUBLICATIONS
Political Theology and Early Modernity, co-edited with Graham Hammill, University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life, University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things (St. Martin’s Press, 2009), co-authored with Ellen Lupton

DIY Kids (Princeton Architectural Press, 2007), co-authored with Ellen Lupton.

Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology, University of Chicago Press, 2005. (Released in paperback, 2013.)

Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature, Stanford UP, 1996.

After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis, co-authored with Kenneth Reinhard, Cornell UP, 1993. Reprinted in 2010 by the Davies Publishing Group with a new preface and additional chapter.

Many articles on Shakespeare, religion and literature, Spenser, political theology, affordances, and psychoanalysis.