Hillary Eklund

Hillary Eklund specializes in literatures of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and regularly teaches courses on Shakespeare, Renaissance poetry, and literature and environment. In her scholarship, she seeks to understand the moral attitudes and material practices of the era that gave rise to the Spanish and English empires, global capitalism, and slavery.

Her first book, Literature and Moral Economy in the Early Modern Atlantic: Elegant Sufficiencies (Routledge, 2015), describes how literary texts trace changing perceptions of what it means to have enough at the turn of the seventeenth century. Prof. Eklund is the editor of Ground-Work: English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science (Penn State University Press, 2017), and co-editor, with Wendy Beth Hyman, of Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Teaching Renaissance Literature Matters Now (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). She has published essays in journals such as Shakespeare Studies, SEL, Criticism, ELR, and PMLA (forthcoming), as well as book chapters in collections on a variety of topics. She is the co-founder, with Debapriya Sarkar, of the Renaissance Racial and Environmental Justice Working Group, an interdisciplinary public humanities initiative.  

Her current book project describes how wetlands, often perceived as nature’s mistakes, both compel and elude human designs in the seventeenth century. Wetlands, she argues, demonstrate a series of “unfast” countermoves to the fast violence of colonial incursion and technological imposition, and to the slow violence of ecological manipulation and resource expropriation.  

Before coming to Grinnell, Prof. Eklund taught in the English department at Loyola University New Orleans for fifteen years.