Graduate Students in Early English Literature and Culture
The English Department boasts a large and vibrant community of graduate students in Early English Literature and Culture. As the list below of dissertation topics and/or research interests suggests, graduate students working in the early periods demonstrate a wide range of scholarly engagements. Our recent students now hold tenure-track positions at such institutions as the following: University of Houston, California State University – San Bernardino, University of Massachusetts – Boston, Eastern Michigan University, Ball State University, Grand Valley State University, State University of New York – Brockport, Towson University, and DePauw University.
Gina Brandolino
Dissertation: "Voice Lessons: Violence, Voice, and Interiority in Middle English Religious Narratives 1300-1500"
William Christopher Brown
Medieval literature, particularly chronicles and medieval intellectuals, Gramsci, Foucault, Marx, postcolonial theory, queer theory, post-structuralism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis.
Thomas Cuthbertson
The Concept of Folly within Shakespearean Comedy
Linda Englade
Dissertation: "The Science of Poetry and the Coterie of the Occult"
Other Interests: Coterie poets of Tudor/Stuart Britain, circulation of occult knowledge from the late Middle Ages through the Early Modern period, history of print and manuscript circulation in the Renaissance/Early Modern period, material production of texts, domestic texts in the Early Modern period and Victorian England.
Bonnie Erwin
Dissertation: "Gender, Race, and the Individual Subject in Middle English Representations of Conversion"
Other Interests: Middle English literature of the fourteenth century
Marilyn Ford
Dissertation: "The Power of the Gift: Renegotiating the Concept of Honor in Shakespeare."
Other interests: Shakespeare, Renaissance drama, coterie poetry, gift exchange, concepts of authorship, concepts of social identity, the interaction between manuscript and print cultures
Kerilyn Harkaway
Fifteenth-century romance and hagiography, psychoanalysis, Marxist theories, and theories of religion
Megan Hartman
Dissertation: "The Hypermetric Line in Germanic Meter"
Other Interests: metrics, comparative philology, and Old English literature
Emily Houlik-Ritchey
Medieval Romance, Chaucer, Medieval Spain, late medieval poetry, gender/representations of women, and psychoanalysis
Lesley Jacobs
Dissertation: "Kinship and Violence in Medieval Narratives of Northwest Europe"
Other Interests: Celtic languages and literature (Irish and Welsh) and Old Norse, Old English, and Early Middle English literature and culture.
Heather Johnson-Shillinglaw
Dissertation: "The Soul of the Book: Textual Theory in Herbert, Trapnel, Vaughan, Traherne, and Milton"
Melinda Kingsbury
Dissertation: Figures of Eloquence: Rhetorical Agency in the Female Complaint
Other Interests: Ovidian complaint poetry of the Tudor and Stuart eras; Contemporary critical approaches to gender; the rhetorical functions of feminine speech in early modern female complaint poetry.
Lindsay Knight
Old English prose, Translations of Latin texts into Old English.
Leticia Liggett
Dissertation: "Representing Nature in Early Modern British Poetry"
Other Interests: Early Modern Poetry; Discourse of rights–human & animals; Cultural Studies.
Ya-Shih Liu
Dissertation: "A Regnal Genealogy in Trouble: The Trojan Myth as a Traumatic National Historiography in Late Medieval England"
Other Interests: Old and Middle English Language and Literature, Psychoanalysis, Postcolonialism, Cultural Studies
Matthew Lynch
Poetics, especially Renaissance, Classical, & Old English poetry
Elise Lonich
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, especially Donne and Spenser; Augustine; and Reformation and Counter-Reformation theology
Pat Maley
Renaissance Literature and Culture
David McAvoy
Shakespeare and Cultural Studies (especially how Shakespeare is deployed and received as a pedagogical matrix through which notions of modernity, mass culture, and "the popular" are interrogated); pedagogical structures in popular culture, contemporary youth.
Tracey Metivier
Renaissance Literature and Culture
Brent Moberly
Dissertation: "’Wayke Been the Oxen’: Plowing, Presumption, and the Third-Estate Ideal in Late Medieval England"
Katie Peebles
Dissertation: "Medievalism’s Inheritance"
Other interests: Antiquarianism, ethnography, folklore and literature, heritage construction, invention of tradition, medievalism, Middle English literature and culture
Whitney Purcell
Renaissance Literature and Culture
Brigid Reardon
Dissertation: "Exchange in Old English Poetry: Words, Weapons, and Wealth as Related Economics"
Richard Sears
Dissertation: "Rogues and the Utopian Imagination in Early Modern Literature"
Other Interests: Early modern rogue literature and drama, Theories of utopia and social imagination
Grant Simpson
Theory and practice of electronic editions, digital humanities, textual criticism, manuscript studies, philology, corpus linguistics, critical theory.
Nathanial B. Smith
Dissertation: "’A Passion of the Inner Parts’: Dreaming, Reading, and the Embodied Subject in Early Renaissance English Literature"
Maura Smyth
Dissertation: "The Development of Early Modern Fancy as an Alternate Form of Imaginative Agency in Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries."
Other Interests: early modern literature; the early modern imagination and extra-rational logics; the Scientific Revolution; Shakespeare; Milton; early modern women writers; rhetorical theory.
Corey Sparks
Middle English Literature and Culture
Tamara Stasik
Dissertation: "Forms of Living: Asceticism, Culture, and Articulating the Via Media in late Medieval English Literature"
Deborah Strickland
Dissertation: "Model Failures: Lost Women and the Scene of Writing, 1343-1603"
Erin Sweany
Anglo-Saxon Literature, Germanic Philology, and Manuscript Studies.
John Walters
Sixteenth-century poetry and drama, the Reformation in literature, and early modern Ireland.
Jenna Whittaker
Sixteenth and seventeenth century English Literature - particularly women writers, Renaissance Ovidianism, and literary automata
Betsy Williamson
Dissertation: "The Quest for Collective Identity in the Middle English Charlemagne Romances"
Other Interests: Old English language and literature, Old Norse language and literature, and medieval travel narratives, and modern medievalism.
Peter Zervos
Renaissance Literature and Culture
