Jonathan Koch

Assistant Professor of English

Coordinator of Digital Humanities

Humanities and Teacher Education, Seaver College

PLC 108

310.506.4435

Biography

Jonathan Koch is assistant professor of English at Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA. A native of Baltimore, Professor Koch received his BA from Davidson College and his MA and PhD from Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on early modern British literature, history, and religion, with a particular focus on the experiences and expressions of religious toleration in seventeenth-century England. Professor Koch has published articles on toleration and on book history and has held fellowships at the California Institute of Technology and the Henry E. Huntington Library. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled “With a Forbearing Spirit: The Poetics of Religious Toleration in Revolutionary England,” which asks how early modern women and men imagined the experience of tolerating—of ‘bearing with’ one another—in plays, verse, satire, and polemic.

Education

PhD, Washington University in St. Louis, 2020
MA, Washington University in St. Louis, 2016
BA, Davidson College, 2011

Research
Awards
Presentations

Amplified Edition of “Phalaris and the Brazen Bull,” by Hester Pulter (Poem 115), in The Pulter Project: Poet in Making, edited by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (2024), https://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/poems/ae/phalaris-and-the-brazen-bull-emblem-50/#ae
“Phalaris and Perillus in Early Modern Print” (Curation, Poem 115), in The Pulter Project: Poet in Making, edited by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (2024), https://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/poems/ae/phalaris-and-the-brazen-bull-emblem-50/#phalaris-and-perillus-in-early-modern-print
“Procrustes, Sciron, Termerus, and Sinis in Early Modern Print” (Curation, Poem 115), in The Pulter Project: Poet in Making, edited by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (2024), https://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/poems/ae/phalaris-and-the-brazen-bull-emblem-50/#procrustes-sciron-termerus-and-sinis-in-early-modern-print
“Pulter and Jamaica,” (Curation, Poem 115), in The Pulter Project: Poet in Making, edited by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (2024), https://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/poems/ae/phalaris-and-the-brazen-bull-emblem-50/#pulter-and-jamaica
“When Tolerance Was No Ideal,” Modern Reformation, 31.4 (2022): 32–38.
“Negotiating Religious Difference in 18th-Century Kilkenny,” Huntington Frontiers, Henry E. Huntington Library (Spring 2022): https://www.huntington.org/frontiers/negotiating-religious-difference-18th-century-kilkenny
"Voyages d’un évêque français à Londres,” with Steven N. Zwicker, Revue Bossuet no. 12 (2021): 85–110.
‘No empty place for complementing Doubt’: The Spaces of Religious Toleration in Andrew Marvell’s ‘Flecknoe’,” Review of English Studies 71, no. 201 (2020): 687–708.
“‘The Phanaticks Tyring-Room’: Dryden and the Poetics of Toleration,” Studies in Philology 116, no. 3 (2019): 539–66.

Cornelison English Award for Best Essay in Literary Criticism, Washington University in St. Louis (2016).
Charles E. Lloyd Award for Best Non-Fiction Essay, Davidson College (2011).

“Sighing for the Cause: Forms of Martyrdom and the Politics of Suspiration in Pulter and Milton,” Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, Baltimore, MD, October 2023.
“For the Benefit of English Readers’: Collecting Milton’s Prose (1698),” International Milton Symposium, Toronto, Canada, July 2023.
“Gut Reactions: Ventriloquy, Forbearance, and the Cultivation of a Public Good,” Shakespeare Association of America, Minneapolis, MN, March 2023.
'“Trying the Axe: Libel and the Poetics of Torture in Cromwellian England,” Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies, Riverside, CA, March 2023.
“The Violence of Empire: Pulter’s ‘Phalaris’ and the Cromwellian Protectorate in England and the Caribbean,” Renaissance Society of America, San Juan, PR, March 2023.
“Milton among the Licensers,” 2022 Conference on John Milton, St. Louis, MO, June 2022.
“A Supplie for the Commonwealth: Sir John Harington in Cromwellian England,” Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, Dublin, Ireland, April 2022.
“The Business of Tender Conscience: Printing Toleration in Restoration England,” Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, Virtual Conference, April 2021.
“The Limits of Religious Toleration in the Anti-Hagiographic Writing of Donne and Milton,” Modern Language Association Annual Meeting, Seattle, WA, January 2020.
“When a Nazarite Marries a Philistine: Mixed Union in Milton’s Samson Agonistes,” International Milton Symposium, Strasbourg, France, June 2019.
“‘No Empty Place for Complementing Doubt’: The Spaces of Religious Toleration in Marvell’s Anticlerical Satire,” Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, Toronto, Canada, March 2019.
“‘The Phanaticks Tyring-Room’: Dryden and the Poetics of Toleration,” English Graduate Student Colloquium, Washington University in St. Louis, MO, November 2018.

Topics

Early Modern British Literature
Shakespeare
John Milton
Andrew Marvell
Religion and Literature
History of the Book
Digital Humanities
Intellectual History

Courses

Great Books
Shakespeare
Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century British Literature
Introduction to Digital Humanities