Professor and Chair of English
New York University
Jenny C. Mann is a scholar and teacher of early modern English literature and culture. Her research centers problems of form in literary history. In her published work, she focuses on the relationship between poetics, rhetoric, mathematics, natural philosophy, the history of sexuality, and literary expression in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Jenny's teaching takes an interdisciplinary, problem-based approach to a broad range of topics in early modern studies, with an emphasis on utopia and literature/science studies. In her classes, students consider early modern engagements with classical literature and culture. Such engagements expose the violent contradictions of the early modern world, a tumultuous era of colonial eixpansion, philosophical skepticism, religioous conflict, aesthetic experimentation, and scientific innovation.
Latest Book
Princeton University Press · 2026
Although we commonly understand “utopia” as an ideal society, this book shifts our understanding of utopia from its politics to its form. Mann mobilizes concepts from logic and mathematics to demonstrate how paradox, labyrinth, and recursion become the techniques of utopian invention in the early modern period.