Professor
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My scholarly work in European Renaissance literature has come to focus particularly on age studies or “literary gerontology”: how old age was understood, misunderstood, and depicted in early modernity, amid the intergenerational politics that shaped period attitudes. I published my initial work on the subject in Constituting Old Age in Early Modern English Literature, from Queen Elizabeth to King Lear. That book contested traditional presumptions that late life was then dismissed as little more than a time of withdrawal and preparation for death, through close rereading of such Elizabethan authors as Spenser, Sidney, Ralegh, Shakespeare, Donne, and the queen herself. I have since then edited and contributed to Bloomsbury’s Cultural History of Old Age in the Early Modern Era (1400-1650)—a project I developed during a faculty residency at the University of Padua in the spring of 2018—scheduled for release in 2024. An abiding interest in lyric poetry’s societal contexts that steered my first book Policy in Love: Lyric and Public in Ovid, Petrarch, and Shakespeare continues to inform my work. Most recently, my research has taken up the self-conscious gendering that shapes the era’s lyric performativity. I am currently exploring how male English poets of the seventeenth century found themselves obliged to conceive their art’s “masculine line” anew in the presence of an emerging company of publishing female writers, whose rich accomplishments I examine more exclusively in my course on early modern women authors.
The opportunity to field seminars and survey courses in all these topics has provided a valuable classroom platform for testing out my ideas on the aggressively curious students I have known since arriving at BU in 1987. Outside the units in Shakespeare and early British literature that I have regularly taught, my own humanist infatuation with classical culture finds an outlet in our survey of European authors from Homer to Dante and grounds my (favorite) course in the history of western literary criticism. Throughout, our students’ healthy eagerness to meet the challenges presented by this material—which demands rigorous engagement with often radically alien ways of thinking—continues to inspire my teaching and writing
Selected Publications
- Editor, A Cultural History of Old Age in the Early Modern Era, 1400-1650 (forthcoming 2024)
- “Fantasies of Prolongevity in Early Modern Culture,” The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Aging (forthcoming 2023)
- “‘The world can be judge’: Edmund Molyneux, Philip Sidney, and the Sublimation of Enmity,” Sidney Journal 34 (2016)
- “‘Parole estreme’: Canzoniere 126,” Approaches to Teaching Petrarch’s Canzoniere and the Petrarchian Tradition (2014)
- Constituting Old Age in Early Modern English Literature, from Queen Elizabeth to King Lear (2012)
- “Lyric Poetry,” The Classical Tradition (2010)
- “Translating Ovid,” The Blackwell Companion to Ovid (2009)
- “Sidney’s Exemplary Horse Master and the Disciplines of Discontent,” Renaissance Historicisms (2008)
- “Fall and Decline: Confronting Lyric Gerontophobia in Donne’s ‘The Autumnall’,” John Donne Journal 26 (2007)
- “The Breast and Belly of a Queen: Elizabeth After Tilbury,” Early Modern Women 2 (2007)
- “Made plaine by examples: Parceling Philip Sidney in Abraham Fraunce’s Arcadian Rhetorike,” Sidney Journal 24 (2006)
- Editor, Ovid in English (1998)
- Policy in Love: Lyric and Public in Ovid, Petrarch, and Shakespeare (1994)
- “Retrieving Jonson’s Petrarch,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1993)
- “Turning Others’ Leaves: Astrophil and the Experience of Defeat,” Spenser Studies 10 (1992)
- “Flecknoe’s Cabinet and Marvell’s Cankered Muse,” Essays in Criticism 40 (1990)
- “Misdoubting His Estate: Dynastic Anxiety in Sidney’s Arcadia,” English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988)
- “A Reconsideration of Ovid’s Fasti,” Illinois Classical Studies 10 (1985)
Honors, Grants, and Awards
- Jeffrey Henderson Research Fellowships (2009-10 and 2016-17)
- NEH Distinguished Teaching Professorship (2005–08)
- NEH Scholarly Publications grant for Policy in Love (1994)
- Folger Shakespeare Library Fellowships (Summer 1992, 1995)