The Department of English is delighted to announce Kim Coles has been selected for an Arcan Semester Research Award for fall 2018. This semester leave from teaching and administrative responsibilities aims to support faculty at the rank of associate professor, with preference given to those for whom the completion of a major project will lead to promotion to full professor.
The Arcan Award will provide Professor Coles time and space to incorporate the suggestions of the external readers who will participate in her upcoming book manuscript workshop and complete Bad Humour: Race, Religion, and the Constitution of Wrong Belief in Early Modern England, an exciting project, which promises to make a significant contribution to the field of Early Modern Studies. In this project, Professor Coles explores how early modern medical theory bound together psyche and soma in a tissue of mutual influence, and shows that by the end of the sixteenth century, there is a general acceptance that the soul’s condition, as a consequence of religious belief or its absence, can be manifest in the physical body—and vice versa. Her book explores what this two-way traffic between body and soul implies for religious and racial identification.