Before arriving at St. John’s in 2003, Dr. Mentz taught for
three years in the English Department at Iona College in New
Rochelle, NY. His Bachelors’ degree is from Princeton
University (summa cum laude), where his senior thesis won the
Francis LeMoyne Page Prize in Creative Writing. His PhD is
from Yale University, where he received several prize fellowships
and grants.
He is the author of Romance for Sale in Early Modern
England: The Rise of Prose Fiction (2006), Rogues and
Early Modern English Culture (2004), and numerous articles on
Shakespeare, ecological criticism, maritime culture, and related
topics. He regularly reviews plays for Shakespeare
Bulletin, and his Shakespeare classes see at least one new
live performance each semester.
He has received numerous prize fellowships and grants from such
bodies as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger
Shakespeare Library, and the National Maritime Museum in
London. During the academic year 2008-2009, Dr. Mentz was the
R. David Parsons Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown
University. He has received three St. John's University
Summer Fellowships (2008, 2006, and 2004), and has twice
participated in Research Seminars at the Folger Shakespeare
Library.
Dr. Mentz’s first book, Rogues and Early Modern English
Culture (Michigan, 2004; paperback 2006) is a collection of
essays about criminality and urban culture in England. The
book explores the longstanding fascination criminals and their
stories have in our culture; a review in London’s Times
Literary Supplement claims that it “makes a fine case for the
centrality of the rogue and rogue writing to any understanding of
the early modern city and its culture.” His second book,
Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose
Fiction (Ashgate, 2006), investigates the then-new practice in
Elizabethan London of printing prose narratives to sell them at
city bookshops. This project contributes to the scholarly
subfield known as “the history of the book,” which considers not
just print culture in early modern Europe but also communications
technologies from the pen to the internet.
His current book project, “Shipwreck and the Meanings of Ocean,
1552-1719,” explores shipwreck narratives from Shakespeare’s
The Tempest to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.
With this project Dr. Mentz joins other scholars interested in
“ecocriticism” and “historicizing the oceans” in exploring
humankind’s relationship to the oceans and the natural world, and
also how these symbolic relationships speak to our twenty-first
century ecological crisis.
He was also a McNair Fellowship mentor during 2004-5.
For more information, see Dr. Mentz's website, www.stevementz.com