About

Garrett Sullivan is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. He holds a Ph.D. in English from Brown University (1995) and a B.A. in English from Davidson College (1983). Sullivan is an accomplished scholar with a focus on Renaissance Literature, particularly Renaissance drama, including works by Shakespeare and Marlowe, as well as interests in embodiment and cognition, and early modern cartography. His research explores the social relations and land concepts on the early modern stage, as well as themes of memory, forgetting, and human embodiment in English Renaissance drama. He has authored several books, including 'The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property, and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage,' 'Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama,' 'Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment,' and 'Shakespeare and British World War Two Film.' Sullivan has also co-authored and edited numerous scholarly works, contributed to the editing of important collections, and served as co-editor of the journal Shakespeare Studies. His work has been supported by notable institutions such as the Newberry Library, the National Endowment of the Humanities, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. Additionally, he has co-curated exhibitions at the Folger Shakespeare Library and is a co-editor of the Oxford University Press book series 'Early Modern Literary Geographies.'

Research topics

• Philosophy

Selected publications

• Living and Dying in Christopher Marlowe’s <i>Doctor Faustus</i>

  Renaissance Drama · 2025-03-01

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Kinematics of rift linkage between the Eastern and Ethiopian rifts in the Turkana Depression, Africa

  Basin Research · 2024-09-01 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access1st author

  Abstract Rift initiation within cold, thick, strong lithosphere and the evolving linkage to form a contiguous plate boundary remains debated in part owing to the lack of time–space constraints on kinematics of basement‐involved faults. Different rift sectors initiate diachronously and may eventually link to produce a jigsaw spatial pattern, as in the East African rift, and along the Atlantic Ocean margins. The space–time distribution of earthquakes illuminates the geometry and kinematics of fault zones within the crystalline crust, as well as areas with pressurized magma bodies. We use seismicity and Global Navigation System Satellites (GNSS) data from the Turkana Rift Array Investigating Lithospheric Structure (TRAILS) project in East Africa and a new digital compilation of faults and eruptive centres to evaluate models for the kinematic linkage of two initially separate rift sectors: the Main Ethiopian Rift (MER) and the Eastern rift (ER). The ca. 300 km wide zone of linkage includes failed basins and linkage zones; seismicity outlines active structures. Models of GNSS data indicate that the ca. 250 km‐wide zone of seismically active en echelon basins north of the Turkana Depression is a zone, or block, of distributed strain with small counterclockwise rotation that serves to connect the Main Ethiopian and Eastern rifts. Its western boundary is poorly defined owing to data gaps in South Sudan. Strain across the northern and southern boundaries of this block, and an ca. 50 km‐wide kink in the southern Turkana rift is accommodated by en echelon normal faults linked by short strike‐slip faults in crystalline basement, and relay ramps at the surface. Short segments of obliquely oriented basement structures facilitate across‐rift linkage of faults, but basement shear zones and Mesozoic rift faults are not actively straining. This configuration has existed for at least 2–5 My without the development of localized shear zones or transform faults, documenting the importance of distributed deformation in continental rift tectonics.

  PublisherDOI

• Author response for "Kinematics of rift linkage between the Eastern and Ethiopian rifts in the Turkana Depression, Africa"

  2024-07-05

  peer-review1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Frontmatter

  Penn State University Press eBooks · 2023

  • Philosophy
  DOI

• Seismic Imaging of Heterogeneous Lithosphere Beneath the Unusually Broad Turkana Depression, East Africa

  2023-02-26 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Continental rifting is currently active in East Africa, where breakup of the African continent is generally occurring in relatively focused rift zones within two uplifted plateaus, with magma intrusions the primary mechanism for strain accommodation throughout the crust and mantle lithosphere. Linking the two narrow rift valleys is the low-lying, and as-yet poorly studied Turkana Depression - an unusually broad 300km-wide region of diffuse faulting, seismicity and magmatism. How the East African Rift has developed here remains elusive and is complicated by the fact the Depression was variably stretched by several superposed episodes of failed rifting since the Mesozoic.&amp;#160;Utilising data from the NSF-NERC-funded TRAILS seismic network, we produce the first detailed crustal and uppermost-mantle shear-wave velocity model below the Turkana Depression, illuminating Moho and lithosphere-asthenosphere boundary topography that ultimately shed light on rift development in a multiply-rifted region. We find Turkana&amp;#8217;s lithosphere is relatively melt-poor, unlike the Ethiopian rift and Plateau further north, which have undergone extensive lithospheric modification by voluminous Cenozoic flood-basalt magmatism and magma-assisted rifting. The lower crust below rift zones in Turkana is not associated with markedly slow (melt) or fast (cooled gabbroic intrusions) wavespeeds suggesting magmatic extension has not dominated rift development in Turkana. Throughout the Depression, the thinnest crust resides within failed Mesozoic rift zones which the present-day East African Rift appears to circumnavigate, not exploit. Fast uppermost mantle wavespeeds below the thinnest crustal regions indicate post-Mesozoic rifting, re-equilibrated and possibly melt-depleted mantle lithosphere, which now renders the plate stronger and more refractory than regions not previously rifted. Refractory Proterozoic lithosphere also present in southern Ethiopia may have influenced strain localisation and the broad, complex rift zone between Ethiopia and Kenya.

  PublisherDOI

• Powell and Pressburger’s War

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc eBooks · 2023-01-01

  bookSenior author

  <JATS1:p>A focused study on Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s cinematic contributions to the war effort, arguing for the centrality of propaganda to their work as film artists.</JATS1:p> <JATS1:p>Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger are widely hailed as two of the greatest filmmakers in British cinema history. The release of their first movie, The Spy in Black, barely preceded the beginning of World War Two, and a number of their early masterworks, including The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale, and A Matter of Life and Death, were produced in the service of the war effort. And yet, scholars have neglected the extent to which these films and others, most made with help from the government’s Ministry of Information (MOI), self-consciously explore the relationship between art and propaganda. This book shows that Powell and Pressburger saw no contradiction between their aesthetic ambitions and their cinematic war work: propaganda imperatives were highly conducive to their objectives as both commercial cinema practitioners and artists.</JATS1:p> <JATS1:p>Drawing on production materials from the archives of the British Film Institute, this book charts three phases in Powell and Pressburger’s wartime career: from first time collaborators who strive to reconcile popular cinematic forms with developing notions of what constitutes effective propaganda (Part One); to accomplished, and sometimes controversial, propagandists whose movies center upon Britain’s relations with its enemies and allies (Part Two); to filmmakers whose responsiveness to the propaganda requirements of the late war is matched by a focus, shared by the MOI, on what the post-war future would bring (Part Three).</JATS1:p>

  PublisherDOI

• Taming Marnie : Hitchcock’s Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Hitchcock

  Hitchcock annual · 2023-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Active Deformation Constraints on the Nubia‐Somalia Plate Boundary Through Heterogenous Lithosphere of the Turkana Depression

  Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems · 2023-09-01 · 19 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract The role of lithospheric heterogeneities, presence or absence of melt, local and regional stresses, and gravitational potential energy in strain localization in continental rifts remains debated. We use new seismic and geodetic data to identify the location and orientation of the modern Nubia‐Somalia plate boundary in the 300‐km‐wide zone between the southern Main Ethiopian Rift (MER) and Eastern Rift (ER) across the Mesozoic Anza rift in the Turkana Depression. This region exhibits lithospheric heterogeneity, 45 Ma‐Recent magmatism, and more than 1,500 m of base‐level elevation change, enabling the assessment of strain localization mechanisms. We relocate 1716 earthquakes using a new 1‐D velocity model. Using a new local magnitude scaling with station corrections, we find 1 ≤ M L ≤ 4.5, and a b ‐value of 1.22 ± 0.06. We present 59 first motion and 3 full moment tensor inversions, and invert for opening directions. We use complementary geodetic displacement vectors and strain rates to describe the geodetic strain field. Our seismic and geodetic strain zones demonstrate that only a small part of the 300 km‐wide region is currently active; low elevation and high‐elevation regions are active, as are areas with and without Holocene magmatism. Variations in the active plate boundary's location, orientation and strain rate appear to correspond to lithospheric heterogeneities. In the MER‐ER linkage zone, a belt of seismically fast mantle lithosphere generally lacking Recent magmatism is coincident with diffuse crustal deformation, whereas seismically slow mantle lithosphere and Recent magmatism are characterized by localized crustal strain; lithospheric heterogeneity drives strain localization.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “Hamlet’s a Loser, Leslie”

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-03-24

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Leslie Howard’s Pimpernel Smith seeks to clarify cultural differences between the British and the Nazis by way of Shakespeare—a task complicated by German claims of the playwright’s putatively Nordic nature. This struggle over Shakespeare’s national identity is mirrored, first, in the film’s persistent emphasis on doubles; and, second, in its apparent advocacy for the notion that Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Just as Oxford appears in the film as Shakespeare’s doppelganger, Hamlet shadows both Horatio Smith (played by Howard) and Howard’s screen personae as a cerebral hero. Howard’s willingness to countenance arguments about Shakespeare’s Germanness, as well as entertain Oxfordianism, proves to be central to the film’s propaganda objectives. By contrasting Nazi intolerance for dissent with Smith’s apparent acceptance of heterodox ideas, Pimpernel Smith expresses Britain’s cultural superiority not only by way of Shakespeare, but also through Oxfordian challenges to the playwright’s identity.

  PublisherDOI

• The Black-White Gentleman

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-03-24

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Leslie Arliss’s The Man in Grey features a Regency-period staging of Othello’s murder of Desdemona, with a white Jamaican named Swinton Rokeby (played by Stewart Granger) blacked up for the title role. Partly through Othello, the film suggests a racial fantasy in which Rokeby reaffirms his whiteness by violently reclaiming his island home from emancipated black slaves. In this way, the film captures anxieties about race, sexuality and colonial participation that are activated by the migration to Britain of black West Indians to aid in the war effort; to put it differently, The Man in Grey appropriates Othello in order to explore how racial difference reveals the limits of a coherent British identity. The film also collapses the distinction between Shakespearean tragedy and costume melodrama, thereby mocking the canons of taste (and the view of the Bard) generally shared by film companies, period critics and government propagandists

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Julia Lupton

  University of Colorado System

  223 shared

• Joe Campana

  University of Colorado Boulder

  221 shared

• Scott Oldenburg

  Tulane University

  221 shared

• Paster Folger

  Rice University

  221 shared

• Margaret Simon

  National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

  221 shared

• Wendy Beth Hyman

  221 shared

• Nancy Simpson-Younger

  St. Olaf College

  221 shared

• Rebecca Totaro

  Universität Greifswald

  221 shared

Education

• PhD, English Dept.

  Brown University

  1995

Awards & honors

• Trustee for the Shakespeare Association of America
• Supported by the National Endowment of the Humanities
• Supported by the Folger Shakespeare Library