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.