School of Writing, Literature, and Film

Richmond Barbour has taught English literature at Oregon State University since 1992. He specializes in Shakespeare, Renaissance literature and culture, theater history, travel writing, cross-cultural relations, and oceanic history. He also teaches Classical Mythology and Classical Drama and has conducted several sessions of study abroad in Athens and London. His research interests range from Ben Jonson, authorship, and early modern print culture, to England’s theatrical and maritime industries in Shakespeare’s day, to the textual and material cultures of the early East India Company and the emergence of global corporate power. He has received numerous grants for research at the British Library and the Huntington Library. His articles have appeared in Publications of the Modern Language Association, Huntington Library Quarterly, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Criticism, and Clio; and his book chapters are featured in several edited collections, including Patricia Akhimie and Bernadette Andrea, eds., Travel & Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), and Claire Jowitt and David McInnes, eds., Travel and Drama in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2018). He has published three books: Before Orientalism. London’s theatre of the East, 1576-1626 (Cambridge University Press, 2003, reprinted in paperback, 2009); The Third Voyage Journals: Writing and Performance in the London East India Company, 1607-10 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2009); and The Loss of the “Trades Increase”: An Early Modern Maritime Catastrophe (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), a study named to that Press’s distinguished Haney Foundation Series and, while in progress, honored by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Prof. Barbour is currently preparing a scholarly edition of the Journal of Captain John Saris (1611-13), who commanded England’s first ship to Japan.