Professor Halpern received his Ph.D. at Yale in 1983, and taught at Yale, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the University of California at Berkeley before arriving at Johns Hopkins in 2002. He has been Sir William Osler Professor of English since 2007.
He is the author of four books: Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence (2006); Shakespeare’s Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in Shakespeare, Wilde, Freud and Lacan (2002); Shakespeare among the Moderns (1997); and The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (1991). He is currently at work on a book about tragedy and political economy.
Professor Halpern's interests include sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, especially drama; Shakespeare; modernism; literary theory, especially Marxist and psychoanalytic; aesthetics; science and literature.