The late 16th century witnessed the end of popular belief in purgatory; in the wake of this collapse, English culture became obsessed with melancholy and alienation. Poole proposes that this momentous and widespread shift in eschatological belief was brought on by a rapid change in the understanding of physics through the extensive dissemination of geographic, cartographic, and even perspectival knowledge. Space, in particular, underwent a dramatic transformation from a metamorphic and fluid construction to a calibrated, static entity that was given its final modern articulation by Descartes. With the emergence of modern, quadrated space, the dead no longer inhabited a world that was parallel to and interpenetrating with earthly space, but were spatially severed and temporally repositioned in the "afterlife."

While at the Forum, Poole will focus on a section of her manuscript tentatively entitled Deadlines: Eschatological Dramas in Early Modern England that focuses on relationships with the dead and what is now known as the "afterlife" during the years preceding this Cartesian formulation of a stable, modern conception of space. To explore the dramatic and lyrical expression of these issues, Poole will examine Shakespeare's Othello and Macbeth, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and Donne's poetry and sermons.