Joe Moskenska teaches English Renaissance literature at the University of Oxford. His first book, Feeling Pleasures: The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England (OUP, 2014; paperback 2017), explores the varied and contested importance of touch in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The study combines sustained analyses of specific figures - particularly Edmund Spenser, Lancelot Andrewes, and John Milton - with explorations of a variety of contexts: the touching of relics and the Eucharist, of paintings and sculptures, the role of touch in faith healing and experimental science, the philosophical history of tickling, and the early reception of Chinese medicine in England. Dr. Moskenska’s forthcoming book, Iconoclasm as Child’s Play, begins with the fact that, during the Reformation, holy things were sometimes given to children as toys rather than being broken or burned. In it he considers the conceptual intersections between iconoclasm and play in sixteenth century culture, in later philosophical writing (especially Adorno and Gell), and in the poetry of Spenser. Prof. Moshenska will speak to us about his most recent research concerning the place of sensory experience in early modern literary, philosophical, and devotional culture.