John Staines is Associate Professor of English, and his teaching and research focuses on Renaissance and Early Modern literature and culture.  Before joining the faculty at John Jay, he received his Ph.D. from Yale University and taught at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts and at Earlham College in Indiana.  He is the author of The Tragic Histories of Mary Queen of Scots, 1560-1690: Rhetoric, Passions, and Political Literature (Ashgate, 2009), a study of how political rhetoric uses tragic stories to sway the passions of the public.  He has published essays on John Milton, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare, and written chapters in Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Univ. of Pennsylvania, 2004), Staging Pain, 1580-1800: Violence and Trauma in British Theater (Ashgate, 2009), and The Oxford Handbook of Spenser (Oxford Univ. Press, 2011). His current research explores early-modern responses to religious violence.