Joseph M. Ortiz is the Dorrance D. Roderick Professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso, where he teaches courses on Renaissance and comparative literature. He received a BA in English and Mathematics from Yale University and a PhD in English from Princeton University. He is the author of Broken Harmony: Shakespeare and the Politics of Music and Gordon Merrick and the Great Gay American Novel, as well as the editor of Shakespeare and the Culture of Romanticism. He is currently working on a monograph on the figuration of translation in epic poetry from Virgil to Milton.

How did you develop an interest in the humanities/humanistic social sciences, and what led you to your academic career? 

I actually started college as a math major (my BA is in both English and math), but early in my college career I realized I was much more passionate about my literature classes than my math and physics classes. The literature we read (Homer, Virgil, Dante, Joyce) seemed to be getting at big questions that I had only started to realize there. I wanted to keep reading and studying these texts, especially their relationship to each other. I was fascinated with the way that writers “spoke” to other writers within their own works—and the way that they sometimes imagined these writers speaking back to them.

What advice do you have for students to succeed in their future career paths? 

Show up. It’s a cliché, but it’s true. Many of the opportunities I’ve had in my career stemmed from classes or events that I attended with no particular agenda in mind. Sometimes a chance meeting with a scholar in your field can lead to a professional opportunity, or a reference that someone mentions in a lecture can be the inspiration that leads to a new research project.

Could you tell us about some of the research projects you have currently underway? 

At the moment I’m writing a conference paper on Shakespeare’s poetic meter in the sonnets. I’m interested in how Shakespeare thinks about classical meter (i.e., ancient Greek and Latin poetry) and the impossibility of replicating its effects in English—for Shakespeare this is both a limitation and an opportunity to distinguish himself. Like many of my other projects, this grows out of my interest in the relationship between literature and music. My dissertation (which became my first book) was on music and Shakespeare, and since then I keep returning to poems and plays that reflect on their status as sound objects.

How could this research impact the humanities/humanistic social sciences? 

My BIG project (which I hope to finish in the next few years) is a book on the figuration of translation in classical and Renaissance epic. For a long time I’ve suspected that Virgil, the preeminent classical Latin poet, is pessimistic about his own ability to “translate” Greek Homeric epic to Latin. At some level he is skeptical about his ability to understand Homer truly. I think that Renaissance poets pick up on this skepticism, and it stokes their own pessimism about whether they are reading classical texts “correctly” or are simply projecting their own fantasies onto them. I think this research could impact the humanities today since it can help us think about our own historicist practices of reading and researching. What are we really doing when we study old texts? Are we uncovering a history that earlier people experienced, or are we using these texts to work through our own, modern issues?

What are you passionate about in your field? 

I’ll be honest—I’m a huge nerd. I love studying old books, especially when I get to handle the original versions (at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, or at the British Library in London). I love finding something in these books that hasn’t been noticed before—a reference, an allusion, a notation—and realizing that it tells me something about what the author read or thought.