Gabriel Bloomfield

Gabriel Bloomfield is a scholar of the literature and culture of the British Renaissance, with particular interests in poetry, the history of religion, and gender and sexuality studies. At Smith, he teaches courses on early British literature, Shakespeare, Milton, and queer literary history.

Bloomfield’s first book project, Lyric Reading in the Age of Donne, is a study of the dynamic interplay between lyric technique and biblical interpretation in the tumultuous years following the English Reformation. In the post-Reformation period, interpreting the Bible became an essential aspect of public life: the scriptures were newly available in English translations, and preachers were tasked with instructing their congregations in the arts of analyzing their difficult, “darke” texts. Lyric Reading argues that lyric poets of this period, both firmly canonical (John Donne, John Milton) and lesser-known (Anne Lock, William Alabaster) transformed the lyric into a venue for practicing and theorizing the pulpit’s methods of textual interpretation. The lyric’s brief dalliance with interpretive theorizing, moreover, has cast a long shadow over the history of literary criticism—Lyric Reading concludes by suggesting that the lyric’s capacity to theorize interpretation became an essential resource for the burgeoning practice of close reading in the 20th-century rise of professional literary study.

Bloomfield’s published work includes essays on the homiletics of John Donne’s poetry; on the georgic afterlives of Milton’s Paradise Lost; and on queer influence in the seventeenth-century Petrarchan lyric. He has also written several articles on the seventeenth-century religious poet George Herbert, including a study of typographical spacing in Herbert’s The Temple and an analysis of Herbert’s most famous poem, “Love (3),” from the perspective of early modern trans studies. He is also a scholar of queer cinema, having published the first and still only scholarly account of the cult film Clue.

New essays commissioned for the collections George Herbert and Eloquence (Cambridge UP, 2026), The Oxford Handbook of George Herbert, and Trans Milton are in progress or in production. Bloomfield’s research has been supported by grants from the Folger Shakespeare Library and a year-long fellowship at the Huntington Library in California.

“The Gender of George Herbert’s Love,” Renaissance Quarterly 79, no. 1 (2026): 188–220.

“‘I / Will petrify’: Queering Influence in Metaphysical Lyric,” in Literary Form After Matter 1550–1700, ed. Katherine Hunt and Dianne Mitchell (Edinburgh University Press, 2026), 81–89.

“Green’s Clues, or, What’s Queer About Clue?,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 38, no. 3 (2023): 6–33.