Andrew Wadoski

I specialize in English Renaissance literature with a particular interest in the writings of Edmund Spenser. My broader research agenda focuses on the ways 16th-century English writers navigated the cultural and intellectual upheavals at the threshold of early modernity. This interest took shape in my first book, published by Manchester University Press (June, 2022). This book offers a novel account of Edmund Spenser as a moral theorist, situating his ethics at the nexus of moral philosophy's profound transformation in the early modern era, and the English colonization of Ireland in the turbulent 1580's and 90's. It revises a scholarly narrative describing Spenser's ethical thinking as derivative, nostalgic, or inconsistent with one that contends him to be one of early modern England's most original and incisive moral theorists, placing The Faerie Queene at the center of the contested discipline of moral philosophy as it engaged the social, political, and intellectual upheavals driving classical virtue ethics' unraveling at the threshold of early modernity. My newest project seeks to understand the historical emergence of capitalism in early modern England through the works of writers such as More, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. I am particularly interested in the ways works like Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland, Milton’s Areopagitica and Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice explore (we we would now call) “the market” not simply as a concrete and bounded space of negotiated mercantile exchange, but as an abstracted normative mechanism governing value and judgment in society writ large.

Before coming to Virginia Tech, I was an associate professor of English at Oklahoma State University, where I was awarded the Regents’ Distinguished Teaching Award. I am an associate editor of Milton Quarterly, and have served on the executive committee of the International Spenser Society.