Marissa Nicosia is a PhD candidate in the Department of English. Her work engages with the fields of early modern English literature, material texts studies, and political theory. Marissa's dissertation, " 'finding Poesy as usefull now': Reading History and Political Theory in Seventeenth-Century English Literature," studies the relationships between historical literary genres, political philosophies, current events, and local acts of appropriation and reading across a long seventeenth century.