Joe Moshenska, Fellow and Lecturer in English, Trinity College, University of Cambridge

Joe Moshenska was educated at Sidney Sussex, Cambridge, and at Princeton University, where he was initially the Eliza Jane Procter Visiting Fellow before receiving his PhD. He is now a Fellow and Lecturer in English at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he mostly teaches the literature and culture of Renaissance England.

"Moshenska, in this careful, authoritative, yet often amusing and entertaining study, sets out to offer an alternative account, where tactility retains perhaps not its primacy in the hierarchy of the senses." - Eric Langley, The Seventeenth Century.

"Feeling Pleasures develops subtle accounts of the ambivalent status of touch in specific literary texts (especially The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost) and also makes a brilliant argument for touch as a major contributor to theories of perceiving, knowing, and social organization, not only in natural and political philosophy (Bacon, Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Hobbes, Margaret Cavendish, Robert Boyle, and more) but also in the visual arts and medicine [some of the] best work of the year." - Katherine Eggert, Recent Studies in the English Renaissance

"Joe Moshenska's extraordinary book Feeling Pleasures is a richly textured gathering together of canonical literature, philospophy and science, alongside the seriously strange ... It is a terrific accomplishment." - Katherine Craik, The Times Literary Supplement

"A compelling new approach for sensory studies, one that grapples with tactility as an experimental interface with the world." - Holly Dugan,The Spenser Review

"Moshenska delivers an extremely readable and satisfying piece of historically informed literary criticism, which should deservedly take its place in a well-established critical field ... His contribution is, at heart, a study of the period vocabulary of touch, vulnerability and sensitivity and, as such, involves itself deeply in the language and metaphor of each evocatively treated text. Feeling Pleasures is often touching, consistently sensitive and genuinely pleasurable." - Eric Langley, The Seventeenth Century

"[A]n impressive scholarly achievement. This thoughtfully observed and beautifully written book is a pleasure to read, and a moving reminder that the instinct toward intimate contact lies at the heart of all of our inquiries into the lost worlds of the past." - Tanya Pollard, Renaissance Quarterly