Joshua Eckhardt

Joshua Eckhardt is a Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, specializing in Early Modern English manuscripts, bookshops, libraries, and literary history. He holds a PhD from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2005), and has authored/co-edited seminal works like Religion Around John Donne (2019) and Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England (2014). His research explores manuscript culture, textual transmission, and the intersection of literature with religion and politics.

Current courses include ENGL 203 (British Literature I), ENGL 325 (Early Modern Literature), and ENGL 411 (Women’s Writing in Early Modern England). Eckhardt is General Editor of British Virginia, a digital publisher of colonial documents, and a Council Member of the Renaissance English Text Society.

His scholarship emphasizes the materiality of texts and their social contexts. Recent articles (e.g., 2022’s A Book Historiography of the English Poetry Miscellany) highlight interdisciplinary approaches to manuscript studies and early modern literary form. He received the John Donne Society Award for Distinguished Publication (2019) for his work on Donne’s religious contexts.