Gabriel Z. Bloomfield

Visiting Assistant Professor of English

Associations

English

About

Gabriel Bloomfield joins Bates as a Visiting Assistant Professor of English. His research and teaching center on the British Renaissance, with a particular emphasis on the intersections of poetry, the history of religion, and gender and sexuality studies. He particularly enjoys teaching the works of Anne Lock, John Donne, Aemilia Lanyer, and John Milton in courses such as “Metaphysical Poetry” and “Queering the Renaissance.”

Professor Bloomfield is currently completing his first book, Lyric Reading in the Age of Donne—a study of how early modern sermons and devotional poems colluded to produce the modern critical practice of close reading—and writing a suite of essays on forms of non-cisgender embodiment in the transnational Renaissance lyric. His articles have appeared or are forthcoming in the journals English Literary History, Shakespeare Quarterly, and Renaissance Quarterly as well as the edited volumes Literary Form After Matter and Trans Milton. This research has received broad institutional support, including grants from the Folger Shakespeare Library and a long-term fellowship at the Huntington Library in California. Alongside his primary research area, Professor Bloomfield maintains a side interest in queer cinema studies; he has published what is, to his knowledge, the first and only scholarly article on the 1980s cult movie Clue.

Professor Bloomfield holds a BA from Yale and a PhD from Columbia. Prior to his arrival at Bates, he was an Assistant Professor of English at the US Naval Academy.

View CV

Some Recent Publications

“The Gender of George Herbert’s Love,” Renaissance Quarterly 79 (2026) (forthcoming).
“Green’s Clues, or, What’s Queer about Clue?,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 38, no. 3 (2023): 6–33 (link).
“Exegetical Shakespeare: Hamlet and the Miserere Mei Deus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 70, no. 3 (2019): 1–24 (link).

Expertise

16th- and 17th- century English poetry, early modern British literature and culture, gender and sexuality, history of religion, poetry and poetics, protestant reformation, Shakespeare

Current Courses

Fall Semester 2025

Foundations of English Literature

ENG 109

This course introduces students to the major genres, critical approaches, and topics in the field of literary study.

Topics in Early Modern Literature

ENG 222

A survey of major literature – poetry, drama, and prose – written before 1700. Topics may include (but are not limited to): lyric poetry of the sacred and the profane; politics and the public stage; prose romance; colonialism and its entanglement with the literary; the history of identity format…

Senior Thesis

ENG 457

Students register for ENG 457 in the fall semester. Majors writing an honors thesis register for both ENG 457 and 458.

Winter Semester 2026

Introduction to Early Modern Literary Studies

ENG 102

An introduction to early modern literary studies. Special attention will be paid both to the skills needed for all literary analysis, as well as to topics, genres, authors, and themes particularly resonant in English literature from 1500-1800. These topics may include (but are not limited to): the r…

Shakespeare and Early Modern Racialization

ENG 214

This course examines the historical, ideological, and discursive construction of race in early modern England. Through the lens of Shakespearean drama, we will also trace, interrogate, and consider the ways that our contemporary world has inherited and perpetuated such constructions. At stake in exa…

Senior Thesis

ENG 458

Students register for ENG 458 in the winter semester. Majors writing an honors thesis register for both ENG 457 and 458.

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