Gavin Hollis

Gavin Hollis is an associate professor at Hunter College CUNY specializing in Shakespeare and early modern drama and culture. His particular area of focus is the emergence of “globalization” in the 16th and 17th centuries and its resonance across a range of cultural forms and practices, including those connected to the stage, the page, and the image.

His book, The Absence of America: the London Stage 1576-1642 (Oxford University Press, 2015) was a finalist for the Shakespeare’s Globe First Book Award. He is currently working on a second monograph, entitled Shakespeare’s Mappery, which traces “the social life of maps” in post-Reformation England, both in terms of early modern material cultures and in terms of the poetics and dramaturgy of poets and dramatists like John Donne, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, Robert Herrick, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare. In addition to his book projects, he has published journal articles and book chapters on emergent cultures of cartography in early modern Europe, encounter narratives in British North America, and the dramatic trope of European males dressing up as Indians. He has published multiple reviews of dramatic productions of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries and of numerous scholarly monographs.

At Hunter, Professor Hollis teaches ENGL 252 (Introduction to Literary Studies), ENGL 350 (Renaissance Drama), ENGL 352 (Shakespeare Survey), and ENGL 715 (Shakespeare - Graduate course, topics vary). He has also taught ENGL 494 (Honors Seminar) and in the Thomas Hunter Honors Program (HONS 301). He is happy to talk with students about MA theses, independent studies, and Mellon Fellowships that intersect with his areas of interest.

• PhD in English Language and Literature, The University of Michigan (2008)

• The Absence of America: The London Stage, 1576-1642. Oxford University Press for the Early Modern Literary Geographies series, 2015.
• “‘The new map with the augmentation of the Indies’: Geographical Knowledge Communities at the Inns of Court and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.” Forthcoming in Shakespeare Survey for a themed issue, “Shakespeare and Communities,” vol. 28, Fall 2025.
• “Trifling with Catastrophe in King Lear,” SEL: Studies in English Literature for a special issue, “World, Globe, Planet,” edited by Ayesha Ramachandran and Joseph Campana, vol. 62.1, Winter 2022. Runner Up for the Shakespeare Associate of America Innovative Article Award, 2025.
• “The End of All: Worldliness, Piety, and Maps as Memento Mori in the Post-Reformation English Household.” Making Worlds: Global Invention in the Early Modern Period, edited by Angela Vanhaelen and Bronwen Wilson, University of Toronto Press, 2022.
• “Saying it Like ‘Indians’: The Wooster Group's Cry Trojans!, Sa(l)vage Ethnography, and the Politics of ‘Playing Injun,’” SCENE no. 1 (2017), online.
• “Shakespeare, Maps, and Map Literacy.” Commissioned for The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare (print and on-line), edited by Bruce R. Smith, Cambridge University Press, 2016.