Christopher Yates

Christopher Yates is a literary scholar whose work examines the circulation of money, objects and bodies in early modern poetry and drama. He received his PhD in English from Brown University, where his dissertation project tracked the figure of the “hoarder” in its various manifestations across the early modern page and stage. His work examines the hoarder as a negative type or boogeyman in a range of early modern discourses, from theology to economics, from Luther and Calvin’s critique of the Catholic Church to mercantilist accounts of New World trade. His research has been greatly informed by work in global early modern studies, which have both highlighted non-canonical works and re-examined canonical texts within the expanded global framework that emerged in the early modern world system. At Brown, he received a Mellon Foundation grant to lead a dissertation workshop on the topic of the global Baroque and a teaching fellowship at the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning. In addition to teaching at RISD, he teaches literature and composition at Brown University, where he previously served as a visiting assistant professor.