Brandon Taylor

Research

My research examines how early modern texts participated in the contested languages of institutional authority. I am particularly interested in how writers engaged the emerging corporate form: a legal structure with theological stakes and rhetorical consequences they could not ignore.

My current book project, Empire of the Unincorporated, examines how seventeenth-century writers such as John Donne and Aphra Behn responded to the logic of incorporation. Drawing on legal history and political theology, the project explores how English writers both engaged and struggled against the grammar of institutional power. The book attends closely to the ideological work required to sustain empire and racial slavery, and to the economic abstraction that underwrote both.

I am currently developing articles on Donne’s 1622 Virginia Sermon and the rhetoric of the New Model Army, as well as a longer piece on Behn’s Oroonoko. My work is rooted in early modern religious writing and Atlantic history, with particular attention to corporate legal theory and the places where literary and institutional form press against each other. I also write for general audiences on the moral stakes of institutional life.

Selected Articles in Progress

• God’s Business: The Virginia Company Sermons and John Donne’s Corporate Theology Revised and resubmitted, SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900

  The Virginia Company’s 1609 sermons, culminating in Donne’s 1622 sermon, use biblical rhetoric to reframe colonial failure as spiritual purpose, constructing an apostolic corporate identity in which piety displaces profit and laying the ideological groundwork for English imperial expansion.

• As One Man: The New Model Army and the Rhetoric of Incorporation Article in progress

  The New Model Army understood itself as a corporate body grounded in voluntary association and spiritual unity. This essay traces how that corporate rhetoric shaped its self-understanding, culminating in a rereading of the Putney Debates as a contest between egalitarian incorporation and emergent oligarchic state power.

• The Tragedy of the Unincorporated: Aphra Behn, Corporate Ideology, and the Rhetoric of Slavery Article in progress

  Corporate discourse migrated from legal charters into literary form. Behn’s Oroonoko absorbs and aestheticizes the rhetoric of incorporation, and its tragic arc reveals the ideological work required to naturalize slavery within England’s emerging imperial order.

Throughout this work, my interest is in how form carries argument. The shape of a document or a sentence does ideological work that explicit statements often cannot.