Ryan Netzley is Professor of English at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is also the editor of Marvell Studies. His research focuses on Renaissance lyric poetry, critical and poststructuralist theory, poetics and reading practices, and Reformation theology. His most recent book is Economies of Praise: Value, Labor, and Form in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (Northwestern University Press, 2024), which examines conceptions of value in encomiastic and epideictic lyrics by Jonson, Donne, Marvell, Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne, Herrick, Bradstreet, Hutchinson, and Milton and their influence on modern notions of aesthetic and economic value. He is also the author of Lyric Apocalypse: Milton, Marvell, and the Nature of Events (Fordham UP, 2015), an examination of Milton’s and Marvell’s attempts to conceive of apocalyptic change in the present.  His first book, Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry (University of Toronto Press, 2011), examines the impact of sacramental presence on our understanding of desire, love, and reading in Renaissance religious verse: namely, how do we desire a god that we do not lack? He is currently at work on a monograph project on the relationship between poetic form and ideas of social order in the seventeenth century. He is also co-editing, with Kimberly Johnson, “Lyric Temporalities,” a collection of essays that explores lyric portraits of time, history, and futurity and the impact of these conceptions on literary critical notions of allusion, influence, and literary history.

At Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, he teaches courses on seventeenth-century poetry, Milton, literary theory, and the value of literary reading, in addition to surveys of early modern British literature and the occasional introduction to Shakespeare and Bible as literature course.