John Leeds
John Leeds earned his MA and PhD as a major in British Renaissance Literature, minor in Classics, at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. At FAU he teaches a variety of courses in British, Biblical, and Classical literature, from Homer and Isaiah to Milton and Hobbes. His area of scholarly research is the relation between Latin and the European vernaculars in 16th-century prose composition. More particularly he studies the conceptual and ideological implications of sentence structure, both Latin and vernacular. In these areas he has published the following articles: “Against the Vernacular: Ciceronian Formalism and the Problem of the Individual,” in the Spring 2004 issue of Texas Studies in Literature and Language (University of Texas at Austin), “Sleeping Beauty, or In Praise of the Passive Voice: Renaissance Chronicles and the Subject of Production,” in the May 2007 issue of Modern Philology (University of Chicago), and “Language and Metaphysics Rejoined: Thomas Linacre and Grammar Beyond the Sign,” in the Spring 2016 issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (Duke University). His book on the relationship between Latin and the Scots vernacular in the chronicle literature of 16th-century Scotland, Renaissance Syntax and Subjectivity: Ideological Contents of Latin and Vernacular in Scottish Prose Chronicles (ISBN 9780754658122), was published by Ashgate in February 2010. His current book project is a study of verbal modality and metaphysical speculation in the Latin prose tradition from Cicero through Thomas More.