Lianne Habinek received her undergraduate degrees from MIT in Courses 9 and 21L; she then earned an MPhil in Renaissance Literature from King’s College, Cambridge University, and an MPhil and PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. Her undergraduate studies in neuroscience inspired her book The Subtle Knot: Early Modern English Literature and the Birth of Neuroscience (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018). Her other research interests include 17th- and 18th-century European literature and natural philosophy, book history, the history of (neuro)science, and contemporary artistic engagements with the brain. She is currently working on a second book project, Unfolding the Early Modern Page, which investigates interactive Renaissance “pop-up” books and other feats of paper engineering and connects these experiments in printing to modern intellectual practices – especially current research into cognitive science and reading.
Most recently, she was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Strasbourg, where she was a member of the SEARCH (Savoirs dans l’Espace Anglophone: Représentations, Culture, Histoire) research team. Prior to that, she was an Assistant Professor of Literature at Bard College. She has held fellowships with the Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Huntington, Folger Shakespeare, and Yale University Medical Libraries. Her work has appeared in the journals Textual Practice, Shakespeare, Configurations, and Shakespeare Studies, as well as in essay collections.
Subjects taught in recent years:
