“How To Do Things with the Book of Daniel: Literary Culture and Early Modern Biblical Imagination”
Jake Wiseman is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Humanities Program at Yale, where he teaches Directed Studies and is a fellow of the Whitney Humanities Center. Jake specializes in the literary cultures of early modern Europe, researching how writers, readers, artists, and scholars reimagined and reinterpreted biblical texts during the religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His work draws on literary studies, biblical scholarship, and intellectual history to explore the confrontation between ancient scriptural texts and the early modern world.
Jake received his PhD in English from University College London in 2024 and holds a Master’s and BA from Oxford University. His first book project shows that the biblical Book of Daniel became a touchstone for problems of textual meaning in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English culture. He is also working on a second book project, which argues that early modern readings of the Bible redefined theories of literary narrative.