Department of English

• Monday, July 21, 2025 - 1:00pm to 3:00pm

FBH Faculty Lounge (room 135) and Zoom

On Monday, July 21, Estevan Alemán will defend his dissertation "Arresting Scenes: The Cultural Vocabulary of Police in Early Modern English Drama." Estevan writes:

This dissertation examines sixteenth and seventeenth-century English drama to reveal the early modern English theatre’s role in making police a coherent concept before the advent of the modern uniformed police force. It investigates the early modern theatre’s comic and romantic conventions that shaped police officers into literary types, whose proximity to the rogues they surveil in plays reveals the close exchange between police knowledge and criminality since the early foundations of the police in the English cultural imaginary. To this end, this study develops a genealogy that explores and analyzes the cultural language for representing the police avant la lettre. It argues that in the wake of Tudor England’s intensification of statute laws that targeted vagrancy as a pressing problem that needed to be surveilled and regulated by the constableship, playwrights made sense of growing anxieties about poverty and disorder, on the one hand, and the logics of police procedures, on the other. They did so by situating police in genres like romantic comedy and city comedy, forms which imagine a return to order: what we might call comedies of policing envision officers as a part of the solution to social ills even as they deflate the seriousness of the power they wield. Through readings of canonical and minor plays by Shakespeare, Middleton, Dekker, Fletcher, Massinger, and other Tudor-Stuart playwrights, these chapters show how the police emerge as a recognizable literary type comprised of stock phrases, conventional practices, and claims to immanent authority vested in the office. In this sense, early modern English drama helped mediate the police as a cultural concept while rendering it palatable for audiences who were routinely subject to police surveillance.

The defense will be a hybrid event, held both in the FBH Faculty Lounge (room 135) and on Zoom (please contact Estevan for the link). The private portion of the defense will take place from 12 to 1 pm, and the public portion of the defense will take place from 1 to 2 pm, to be followed by a celebratory reception.

We hope to see you there as we congraulate Estevan on this wonderful achievement!